FOSDEM20

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

• Chris Aniszczyk, Max Sills and Michael Cheng: Open Source Under Attack. How we, the OSI and others can defend it
• Danese Cooper: How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government. with recent real-world examples
• James Bottomley and Mike Rapoport: Address Space Isolation in the Linux Kernel
• Kris Nova: Fixing the Kubernetes clusterfuck. Understanding security from the kernel up
• Krzysztof Daniel: Is the Open door closing?. Past 15 years review and a glimpse into the future.
• Mateusz Kowalski and Kamila Součková: SCION. Future internet that you can use today
• Merlijn B. W. Wajer and Bart Ribbers: Regaining control of your smartphone with postmarketOS and Maemo Leste. Status of Linux on the smartphone
• Pili Guerra: State of the Onion. The Road to Mainstream Adoption and Improved Censorship Circumvention
• Steven Goodwin: FOSDEM@20 - A Celebration. The cliché of constant change
• Thierry Carrez: Why open infrastructure matters
• Thorsten Leemhuis: The Linux Kernel: We have to finish this thing one day ;). Solving big problems in small steps for more than two decades
• Vladislav Shpilevoy: SWIM - Protocol to Build a Cluster. SWIM gossip protocol, its implementation, and improvements

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!

Submission has closed for the PGP keysigning event. The list of all submitted keys is now published.

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.

If you are participating in the PGP keysigning, you must now:

• Download the list of keys;
• Verify that your key fingerprint is correct;
• Optionally, verify the integrity of the file using the detached signature;
• Print the list of keys on paper;
• Calculate the checksums, as detailed in the list, and fill them in on the designated spots.

If you do not have your own list of keys with your own checksums, you will not be able to participate in the keysigning party! Remember to bring this list, a pen and your ID to the event on Sunday.

For more information about this event, and the location of the files mentioned, see the keysigning page.

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

The following interviews give you a lot of interesting reading material about various topics, from the forgotten history of early Unix to the next technological shift of computing:

• Daniel Riek: How Containers and Kubernetes re-defined the GNU/Linux Operating System. A Greybeard's Worst Nightmare
• David Stewart: Improving protections against speculative execution side channel
• James Bottomley: The Selfish Contributor Explained
• Jon 'maddog' Hall: FOSSH - 2000 to 2020 and beyond!. maddog continues to pontificate
• Justin W. Flory and Michael Nolan: Freedom and AI: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems?. Exploring the intersection of Free software and AI
• Liam Proven: Generation gaps
• Lubosz Sarnecki: The year of the virtual Linux desktop
• Matthew Hodgson: Making & Breaking Matrix's E2E encryption. In which we exercise the threat model for Matrix's E2E encrypted decentralised communication
• Matthias Kirschner: The core values of software freedom
• Michael Meeks: LibreOffice turns ten and what's next. Lots to learn, and get excited about
• Molly de Blanc: The Ethics Behind Your IoT
• Ton Roosendaal: Blender, Coming of Age. 18 years of Blender open source projects
• Warner Losh: The Hidden Early History of Unix. The Forgotten history of early Unix

Last week, we already published our first set of speaker interviews. If you can't wait for FOSDEM 2020, get a glimpse of the talks in all these interviews.

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 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:

• Amanda Brock: United Nations Technology and Innovation Labs. Open Source isn't just eating the world, it's changing it
• Daniel Stenberg: HTTP/3 for everyone. The next generation HTTP is coming
• Free Ekanayaka: dqlite: High-availability SQLite. An embeddable, distributed and fault tolerant SQL engine
• Geir Høydalsvik: MySQL Goes to 8!
• James Shubin: Over Twenty Years Of Automation
• Joe Conway: SECCOMP your PostgreSQL
• Ludovic Courtès: Guix: Unifying provisioning, deployment, and package management in the age of containers
• Paul-Antoine Arras: SaBRe: Load-time selective binary rewriting

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.
• 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!
• Beer event - Be a steward at the beer event, (one of) the greatest FOSDEM-side-activities. During Friday night, the Delirium Café is ours and we organize a world-famous beer event with equally famous Belgian beers. Your role will be to check whether a visitor is indeed FOSDEM-related and sell drinks tokens.

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!