FOSDEM18

It's several months after FOSDEM by now, but our video transcoding infrastructure is still up and running, in order to deal with the long tail of videos with issues that was still outstanding. This will change next week.

Currently, 644 videos have been signed off on, while 25 are marked as needing some kind of intervention or further investigation. These mostly require us to read data from our backups.

Unfortunately, due to various complications, it turns out that getting data from those backups is more involved than we initially thought. Now, almost three months after the event, it is not valuable anymore to invest much time in rescuing those files. Therefore, we will be shutting down the transcoding infrastructure some time next week.

If you were a speaker at FOSDEM 2018, you might want to verify that your video was released correctly, by going to the page of your talk(s) on the schedule and watching the video. If your video contains errors, now is the time to let us know. If the video is not released and you thought it would have been, it is not yet too late. If your video is marked as "broken" or some other similar state on the review interface, and you think it is better to release it in its current state than not to release it at all, inform us now.

If we do not hear about any major issues, we will shut down the transcoding infrastructure some time during the next week.

You can reach us by mail on video@fosdem.org, or via IRC on freenode, channel #fosdem-video.

FOSDEMx is a small scale spin-off of FOSDEM, combining a workshop track geared towards students and anyone interested in the topic, with a main track for a broader audience.

FOSDEMx 0 will take place on Thursday the 3rd of May 2018 at ULB Campus de la Plaine from 16:00 onward. This first edition will introduce attendees to the Python ecosystem.

As this is a smaller event and seats for the workshops are limited, we ask attendees to register upfront. The main track sessions will be open to anyone. Attendance is free of charge for all sessions.

Head over to the FOSDEMx 0 website for more information.

FOSDEM 2019 will take place at ULB Campus Solbosch on Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 February 2019.

Further details and calls for participation will be announced in the coming months.

Our video recording and transcoding pipeline has been streamlined over the past few years; the first video to be released this year was available for viewers yesterday in the afternoon.

As of this writing, there are 54 videos already released to our video site, linked to from the various talks in the schedule, and (for those who prefer it) also available on our YouTube channel. For an overview of what's available, what's on the way, and what still needs to be done, please see the overview page of our review infrastructure.

If you are a speaker and did a talk on saturday, please help us stress-test our review infrastructure by reviewing your talk ASAP! As an added bonus, that also releases your talk to the viewing public so much sooner. If there's a particular talk that has been recorded but which is not public yet, please do not hesitate to ask the speaker to review it as soon as possible.

We proudly present the last set of speaker interviews. See you at FOSDEM this weekend!

• Jon Masters: Exploiting modern microarchitectures. Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks
• Michael Downey: Sustainability of Open Source in International Development. A new approach from the United Nations Foundation
• Nikos Roussos: SatNOGS: Crowd-sourced satellite operations. Satellite Open Source Ground Station Network
• Palmer Dabbelt: Igniting the Open Hardware Ecosystem with RISC-V. SiFive's Freedom U500 is the World's First Linux-capable Open Source SoC Platform
• Pierros Papadeas: The story of UPSat. Building the first open source software and hardware satellite
• Stef Walter: Cyborg Teams. Training machines to be Open Source contributors
• Victor Stinner: Python 3: 10 years later. Looking back at Python evolutions of the last 10 years

If you haven't read our previous interviews with main track speakers yet, take a look at them. It's for free and no registration necessary, just like the conference!

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.