FOSDEM23

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, with the buildup (starting Friday at noon), heralding during the conference and Cleanup (on 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:

• Buildup - 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cloakroom - helping to safely store coats and luggage for our visitors.
• 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.

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 libera (also available via webchat). Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!

With great pleasure (and an apology for missing the deadline by seven days), we can announce the following projects will have a stand at FOSDEM 2023 (4 & 5th of February).

This is the list of stands (in no particular order):

• Eclipse Foundation
• FOSSASIA
• Matrix.org Foundation
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• CentOS and RDO
• FreeBSD Project
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Realtime Lounge
• Free Culture Podcasts
• Open Culture Foundation + COSCUP
• Open Toolchain Foundation
• Open UK and Book Signing Stand
• The Apache Software Foundation
• The Perl/Raku Foundation
• PostgreSQL
• GNOME
• KDE
• GitLab
• Homebrew
• Infobooth on amateur radio (hamradio)
• IsardVDI
• Jenkins
• Fluence
• La Contre-Voie
• IEEE SA Open
• It's time to learn Ada!
• AlekSIS
• Chamilo
• coreboot/flashrom
• PINE64
• MicroPython & Espruino
• openHAB
• Embedded JavaScript: Moddable SDK & Node-RED MCU Edition
• wolfSSL
• Audacity and MuseScore
• VideoLAN
• CiviCRM
• DAVx5 – CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV client for Android + jtx Board
• XWiki & CryptPad
• Libreoffice
• AlmaLinux OS
• Debian
• Fedora Project
• OpenEmbedded
• Linux on Mobile (Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, Mobian and more)
• openSUSE Project
• Ubuntu Ecosystem
• Automotive Grade Linux
• GNU GRUB
• Gentoo
• Ansible
• Grafana
• Bareos
• Foreman
• DRLM (Disaster Recovery Linux Manager)
• OpenNebula
• Mozilla
• Nextcloud: Self-hosted, open file sync & communication platform
• MariaDB Server

All stands will be present for the two days. We will announce the location of every stand closer to the event.

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-third edition will take place on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th February 2023 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels. It will also be possible to participate online.

Developer Rooms

For more details about the Developer Rooms, please refer to the Calls for Papers that are being added to https://fosdem.org/2023/news/2022-11-07-accepted-developer-rooms/ when they are issued.

Main Tracks

Main track presentations cover topics of interest to a significant part of our audience that do not fit into any of the developer rooms, perhaps because of the topic or the large size of the anticipated audience. Presentations should be 50 minutes long including audience questions. FOSDEM covers reasonable travel expenses agreed in advance and arranges accommodation for accepted main track speakers if needed.

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

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are short, 15 minute, talks on a wide variety of topics. Anyone who has something interesting to say about a free software or open source project or topic can apply. We particularly encourage topics that do not fit into any of the other tracks.

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

Online Presentations

In addition to the in-person presentations, some tracks will also accept pre-recorded online presentations. Please indicate on the submission form whether the presentation could be offered on-campus and/or pre-recorded online.

Speakers accepted for a virtual presentation will need to prepare, record and upload it in early January, no later than Friday 20th January. Guidance will be provided. Speakers will need to be in a place with a computer with a reliable internet connection and working camera and microphone when their presentation is scheduled so they can join a video room and take questions and engage in discussion after their pre-recorded presentation is played.

Submission

All proposals for presentations at the event should be submitted through 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.

Submissions will be reviewed as they are received on an ongoing basis. The final deadline is 15th December but some tracks may close earlier if they fill up or the respective call for papers specifies an earlier date.

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 recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC.

We are pleased to announce the developer rooms that will be organised at FOSDEM 2023.

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.

We now invite proposals for developer rooms for FOSDEM 2023.

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-third edition will take place Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th February 2023 in Brussels, Belgium.

Developer rooms are assigned to self-organising groups to work together on open source and free software projects, to discuss topics relevant to a broader subset of the community, etc. Most content should take the form of presentations. Proposals involving collaboration across project or domain boundaries are strongly encouraged.

We are happy that we have the opportunity again to run a physical conference in Brussels. However, this also means that we will have less space for parallel tracks. Thats why we are polling devroom organisers to see if they have any interest in a hybrid session, eg with a physical devroom one day and a virtual session the next day, or even if people would prefer an online devroom only.

For virtual devrooms we would use the same Matrix platform as last year. This allows devroom organizers to run the conference primarily using pre-recorded talks with some live content including Q&A sessions and discussion panels, with streaming and archiving. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). Note that we might decide not to run a virtual component if there is insufficient interest, we will announce the discussion when the list of devroom proposals is announced (31 October).

Devroom managers must enter a complete schedule into our conference system by 15th December.

Developer room proposals should be submitted through the form at https://fosdem.org/devroom which contains further information.

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

Key dates:

• 18 October
  • deadline for developer room proposals
• 31 October
  • accepted developer rooms announced
• 5 November (or earlier)
  • developer rooms issue Calls for Participation
• 15 December (or earlier)
  • developer rooms publish complete schedules

Back after two virtual editions, FOSDEM 2023 will take place at the ULB on the 4th and 5th of February 2023. As has become traditional, we offer free and open source projects a stand to display their work “in real life” to the audience. You can share information, demo software, interact with your users and developers, give away goodies, sell merchandise or accept donations. All is possible!

We offer you:

• One table (180x80cm) with a set of chairs and a power socket.
• Fast wireless internet access.
• A spot on stands.fosdem.org.

You can choose if you want the spot for the entire conference, or simply for one day. Joint submissions (sharing a table) will be favoured in the process.

Submit your application at stands.fosdem.org/submission! Deadline closes the 15th of November; accepted stands will be announced the 1st of December.