FOSDEM18

With only ten days left until FOSDEM 2018, we have added some new interviews with our main track speakers, varying from a keynote talk about 20 years of Open Source Initiative through a speaker who forked his own project and the Next Generation Internet initiative to using TPM 2.0 as a secure keystore:

• Dimitri Staessens and Sander Vrijders: IPC in 1-2-3. Everything you always wanted from a network, but were afraid to ask
• Frank Karlitschek: Why I forked my own project and my own company. ownCloud to Nextcloud
• James Bottomley: Using TPM 2.0 As a Secure Keystore on your Laptop. It's not as difficult as you think!
• Jan Tobias Muehlberg: Sancus 2.0: Open-Source Trusted Computing for the IoT
• Lars Geyer-Blaumeiser: OpenADx – xcelerate your Automated Driving development. Leveraging open collaboration and open source to accelerate development of Automated Driving
• Markus Feilner: Security Theatre. The (mostly) unknown OSI Layer 8
• Markus Raab: Configuration Revolution. Why it Needed 13 Years and How it Will be Done
• Michiel Leenaars: Next Generation Internet Initiative. An opportunity to fix the internet
• Riccardo Bernardini: Terra Bruciata. where bugs cannot survive
• Simon Phipps and Italo Vignoli: Consensus as a Service. Twenty Years of OSI Stewardship

Our interviews page is already filling up nicely with a diverse set of main track speakers. Stay tuned for some more next week.

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:

• Howard Chu: Inside Monero. The world's first fungible cryptocurrency
• Liam Proven: The circuit less traveled. Investigating some alternate histories of computing.
• Manoj Pillai, Krutika Dhananjay and Raghavendra Gowdappa: Optimizing Software Defined Storage for the Age of Flash
• Michael Meeks: Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms. Making LibreOffice work well everywhere.
• Milan Broz: Data integrity protection with cryptsetup tools. what is the Linux dm-integrity module and why we extended dm-crypt to use authenticated encryption
• Peter Zaitsev: MySQL: Scaling & High Availability Production experience for the last decade
• Philipp Krenn: Elasticsearch (R)Evolution. You Know, for Search...
• Rob van Kranenburg and Michiel Leenaars: Next Generation Internet Initiative. An opportunity to fix the internet
• Serge Guelton (serge-sans-paille): Surviving in an Open Source Niche: the Pythran case. a compiler for scientific kernels written in Python, six years later
• Tarek Ziade: Load testing web services at Mozilla with Molotov. http://molotov.readthedocs.io/

Last week, we already published our first set of speaker interviews. If you can't wait for FOSDEM 2018, get a glimpse of the talks in all these interviews. More are coming during the next weeks.

With FOSDEM just around the corner, it is time for us to enlist your help.

Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers make FOSDEM happen and make it a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially for heralding during the conference, during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch. Food will be provided.

Would you like to be part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick? Sign up here! You could really help us out with the following:

• Heralding - Briefly introduce the speakers and the topics of their talks, make sure all talks end on time by giving speakers cues near the end of their time slot. Keep an eye out on room safety and report potential issues such as overcrowded rooms before it becomes more than a "potential" issue.
• Build-up - Setting up the venue on Friday: this mostly involves carrying tables to their destinations and setting them up, putting up signage, covering the walls in brown paper... in short: transform the campus into a conference venue. We need as many volunteers as possible for this task.
• Tear-down - (and cleanup) on Sunday evening: collecting beer bottles, tearing down the network, pulling brown paper off the walls, taking down the signage, stacking the rental tables in neat heaps, broom the floors etc. Basically, make sure we're welcome again next year.
• Infodesk - Available at the infodesk during the weekend: help out fellow attendees with their questions, sell t-shirts etc. Proficiency in English is a must, but if you are proficient in other languages as well, it certainly wouldn't hurt.
• Video - Capturing and recording video. Ensure the livestreams to thousands are up and running and all talks are recorded. This year we're also doing subtitling.
• Network - Deploying the network on Friday: rolling out, neatly securing and crimping UTP cables. People with experience rolling out networks and crimping cables are very welcome!

For more information, please have a look at our volunteer FAQ

If any or all of these sound like your kind of gig, pick your task(s) at our volunteer tool, subscribe to the volunteers mailing list and keep an eye on #fosdem-volunteers on freenode (also available via webchat). Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!

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:

• Diomidis Spinellis: Unix Architecture Evolution from the 1970 PDP-7 to the 2017 FreeBSD. Important Milestones and Lessons Learned
• Mary Bennett: Reimagining EDSAC in open source. An valve computer reimplemented using FPGAs, Arduinos, 3D printing and discrete electronics
• Robert Foss: Running Android on the Mainline Graphics Stack
• Stefan Behnel: Lift your Speed Limits with Cython. Fast native code for Python
• Steven Goodwin: Digital Archaeology. Maintaining our digital heritage

Our keyserver is now accepting submissions for the FOSDEM 2018 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 on Wednesday 24 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 2018.

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.