FOSDEM17

If your non-geek partner and/or kids are joining you to FOSDEM, they may be interested in spending some time exploring Brussels while you attend the conference.

Like previous years, FOSDEM is organising sightseeing tours.

We have just published the second set of interviews with our main track speakers.

The following interviews give you a lot of interesting reading material about various topics:

• Benedict Gaster (cuberoo_): LoRaWAN for exploring the Internet of Things . Talk Hard: A technical, political, and cultural look at LoRaWAN for IoT
• Brooks Davis: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About "Hello, World"*. (*But Were Afraid To Ask)
• Daniel Stenberg: You know what's cool? Running on billions of devices. curl from A to Z
• Keith Packard: Free Software For The Machine
• Klaus Aehlig: Bazel. How to build at Google scale?
• Rich Bowen: Write a Better FM. Read The F* Manual? Maybe you need to write a better f* manual
• Richard Brown: Resurrecting dinosaurs, what can possibly go wrong?. How Containerised Applications could eat our users.

Last week, we already published our first set of speaker interviews. If you can't wait for FOSDEM 2017, get a glimpse of the talks in all these interviews. More are coming during the next weeks.

During the holidays we have performed some interviews with main track speakers from various tracks.

To get up to speed with the topics discussed in the main track talks, you can start reading the following interviews:

• Benjamin Kampmann: It's time to SAFE the Internet. Introducing SAFE, the decentralised privacy-first storage and communication network
• Dominik George and Eike Jesinghaus: The Veripeditus AR Game Framework. Enabling everyone to freely create Augmented Reality Games
• Ed Schouten: CloudABI: easily develop sandboxed apps for UNIX
• Martin Pitt: Continuous Integration at a Distribution Level. Shepherding 30.000 packages to never break
• Mathieu Stephan: The Making of a Secure Open Source Password Keeper. From the Electronics to the High Level Software...
• Nikolai Kondrashov: User Session Recording for the Enterprise. An Open-Source Effort by Red Hat
• Peter Baumann: Datacubes on Steroids with ISO Array SQL. Open Source, Open Standards, Open Terabytes
• Roberto Di cosmo and Stefano Zacchiroli: Software Heritage: Preserving the Free Software Commons

The Linux Professional Institute, the BSD Certification Group and The Document Foundation will offer exam sessions at FOSDEM 2017.

Interested candidates can now register for exams with the respective organisations.

Further details are available on the certification page.

Our keyserver is now accepting submissions for the FOSDEM 2017 keysigning event.

The annual PGP keysigning event at FOSDEM is one of the largest of its kind. With more than one hundred participants every year, it is an excellent opportunity to strengthen the web of trust. For instructions on how to participate in this event, see the keysigning page.

Key submissions close a week before FOSDEM (27 January), to give us some time to generate and distribute the list of participants. Remember to bring a printed copy of this list to FOSDEM.

We are pleased to announce the developer rooms that will be organised at FOSDEM 2017.

Developer rooms are assigned to self-organising groups to work together on open source projects, to discuss topics relevant to a broader subset of the community, etc. The individual developer room organisers will issue their calls for participation in the next few days.

We will update this table with links to the calls for participation.