FOSDEM21

FOSDEM is in 6 days, so now is a good time to check whether you can visit the conference. We're going to walk through all of the bits and pieces so you are fully prepared on Saturday en Sunday between 10am and 6pm CET.

FOSDEM 2021 Online will happen through fosdem.org/2021/schedule, our main website. Each talk is in a room, and each room maps to a virtual room on chat.fosdem.org, combining video and Q&A.

We'll add a link to each room, but the virtual room name is the same as the room name minus the bit before the dot. So you can find the M.misc room at chat.fosdem.org/#/room/#misc:fosdem.org. You do not need an account to view the talks in the virtual room.

Find more details on the practical information page and we hope to see you this weekend!

FOSDEM 2021 is just around the corner, and some of you are probably curious how everything is going to work. After all, in other years you simply had to go the ULB, find your room (always a challenge), sit back and enjoy.

But how is that going to work in this virtual event? Read more and find out!

Like every year, there will be talks, devrooms and stands. While you would normally try to get in a room to see the talk, and watch the video only afterwards (or as a substitute because the room was full); this year, the room is virtual (unlimited capacity) and the talk is the video.

Thanks to the amazing Matrix people, we're able to create virtual (Matrix) chat rooms combining video (the talk) and chat (Q&A and hallroom discussion), so you can watch the talk from the uncrowded environments of your own home, and ask questions or discuss the topic with everybody present. The schedule will have a link to each virtual room, so simply follow that and enjoy the experience (you do not need an account to watch a talk).

The stands are not spread out over the campus, but are concentrated on their own website. You can visit them as you normally would, but we wouldn't want you to miss the opportunity to talk to the team behind each project. Therefore, we've created a chat room for each stand where you can discuss anything with the team and ask the question you always wanted to ask.

We hope to see you next week! Find more details on the schedule and on the practical information page.

With this year’s virtual edition of FOSDEM fast approaching, we look forward to inviting you to volunteer to help support the running of the event.

The twenty-first edition will take place Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th February 2021, online. We will be running a variety of streams including Developer Rooms, Stands, Main Tracks and Lightning Talks.

Because we are sadly unable to meet in person at the ULB in Brussels, a lot of our usual tasks will be superfluous - don’t worry, we won’t send you to an attendee’s house to help clean up a spilled drink! There will also not be a build-up or tear-down, as much of this has been automated with bots and scripts.

However, being in a new conference environment (thanks to the amazing support from the folk over at matrix.org) our virtual InfoDesk will be super important, helping answer all the questions that attendees may have, and providing some basic technical support to anyone who may need it.

This year, we also are renaming the Heralding task to *Hosting*. Our hosts will be key to supporting the speakers during their Q&A sessions, keeping all aspects around that talk running smoothly, and (on the off chance of there being any issues) raising these with a member of FOSDEM staff.

So, do you feel up to the task of helping the machine that is FOSDEM run this special online edition? Great! That’s the spirit – you can go and sign up here. Need some more info? Go and check out our volunteer FAQ page.

Don’t forget to come and say ‘Hi’ over on our mailing list or join us on Matrix or IRC.

We now invite proposals for presentations.

FOSDEM offers open source and free software developers a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Renowned for being highly developer-oriented, the event brings together some 8000+ geeks from all over the world.

The twenty-first edition will take place Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th February 2021, online. We will be running a variety of streams including Developer Rooms, Main Tracks and Lightning Talks.

Proposals

All proposals for presentations should be submitted using Pentabarf: https://fosdem.org/submit. If you already created an account in the system for a previous edition, please reuse it rather than re-registering. You can reset your password here: https://penta.fosdem.org/user/forgot_password

When making a proposal, please select the appropriate track. If the topic fits into a Developer Room, then please refer to that room's call for papers, listed here and select that room as the "track". Select Lightning Talks for a 15-minute Lightning Talk outside the developer rooms or Main Tracks and Other Topics for everything else.

Deadlines

Submission deadlines vary according to the track.

For Developer Rooms, check the relevant Call for Papers.. The final deadline for Main Track and Other Topics and Lightning Talks is 25th December. Accepted speakers will be notified by 31st December

Given the condensed timescale this year, please note that some programme committees may be reviewing proposals and making decisions on an ongoing basis before the published deadlines. This means that, for the most popular tracks, submitting early may increase your chance of acceptance as later submissions may be competing for fewer remaining places in the schedule, and particular themes for sections of the programme might already have been chosen based upon the range of submissions received earlier.

Requirements

Accepted speakers will need to prepare, record and upload their presentation during the first two weeks of January. Guidance will be provided. Speakers will need to be in a place with a computer with a reliable internet connection and camera and microphone when their talk is scheduled so they can join a video room and take questions and engage in discussion after their pre-recorded presentation is played.

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software. By participating in the event you agree to the publication of your recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

Questions or remarks? Contact us at devrooms@fosdem.org, lightningtalks@fosdem.org or program@fosdem.org.

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC.

We now invite proposals for stands for FOSDEM 2021.

FOSDEM offers open source and free software developers a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Renowned for being highly developer-oriented, the event brings together some 8000+ geeks from all over the world.

The twenty-first edition will take place Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th February 2021, online.

Stands allow projects to showcase their work to interested visitors, answer their questions, and in normal years, hand out swag to support their project.

For obvious reasons, unfortunately we will be unable to run a physical conference in Brussels this year, but we would still like to give communities a place to meet online.

We offer you:

1. A position on a special stands website (active during the event) for you to introduce your project. We will organise the stands per theme.
2. Hosting for a webpage and several short videos where you can introduce and demonstrate your project and show people the latest features, discuss your roadmap etc.
3. A chatroom facility to allow visitors to interact with you. (Details will be confirmed closer to the event.)

Proposals should be submitted through the form at stands.fosdem.org/submission which contains further information.

Questions or remarks? Contact us at stands@fosdem.org.

The deadline is the 25th of December.

We are pleased to announce the developer rooms that will be organised at FOSDEM 2021.

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. The list below will be updated accordingly.