fosdem-2024

FOSDEM is over, but our video infrastructure is still working hard!

This year, there were 855 events in rooms where the FOSDEM video team had equipment to stream, record, and publish everything, for a total of 365 scheduled hours of content. Postprocessing that much video is a massive task that takes quite a bit of effort; for this reason, since the 2017 edition, we have crowdsourced most of the manual work that needs to happen for this postprocessing to the devroom organizers and the speakers, as explained in this talk at FOSDEM 2019.

As of this writing, out of those 855 talks, 544 have been reviewed by their speakers and/or devroom organizers and are either available to be wachted through our video archive or the schedule. If you want to know what happened with your favourite talk, please see our review overview page.

Currently, however, our encoders are starting to run dry, and we need more work for them. If you were a speaker or devroom organizer at FOSDEM, please check your mailbox and review the video of your talk(s) as soon as possible, so that we can release them to the world. To do this, you should have received an email with instructions on the email address you entered into pretalx, our conference management application. If you did not receive such an email, please contact us so we can help you get that resolved.

With FOSDEM just a few days away, 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 at the weekend, 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:

• 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.
• 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!
• InfoDesk - Be 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.
• VirtuaL InfoDesk - Want to volunteer, but cant be present at the ULB? We also have our InfoDesk on Matrix. Provide technical support for people watching streams, or pic up other questions about FOSDEM as them come in.
• 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.
• Video - Capturing and recording video. Ensure the livestreams to thousands are up and running and all talks are recorded.
• 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.
• Upacking the van on Monday - All of our gear needs to come out of the vans and back into storage after the conference.
• And many the many other tasks and ways to volunteer over the weekend.

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-infodesk on Matrix Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!

2024 will be the first year there will be a FOSDEM junior track, organizing workshops for children 7-17.

Developers from the FOSS Educational Programming Languages devroom will be organizing workshops for children from 7 - 17 with the help of CoderDojo.

At FOSDEM, volunteers from CoderDojo International, CoderDojo Netherlands, and CoderDojo Belgium will be helping during the workshops. There will be workshops from MicroBlocks, Snap!, Zim, MIT App Inventor, Raspberry Pi, Hedy, and CoderDojo.

For these workshops, you will need to get a free ticket. Visit https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/junior and click on the workshop of your choice. On the workshop page, you will find a link to get a ticket.

We hope to see you soon!

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-fourth edition will take place on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th February 2024 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Developer Rooms

For more details about the Developer Rooms, please refer to the Calls for Papers at https://fosdem.org/2024/news/2023-11-08-devrooms-announced.

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. Where necessary, FOSDEM covers reasonable travel expenses agreed in advance and arranges accommodation for accepted main track speakers.

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

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are short talks on a wide variety of topics. Traditionally at FOSDEM these have been 15 minutes long but this year we also intend to accept some 5 minute talks. 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. When submitting this year, please set the Duration field to either 5 minutes or 15 minutes. (If you request 15 minutes but would be willing to accept a 5 minute slot instead, mention this in the Submission Notes field.)

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

Submission

All proposals for presentations at the event should be submitted through pretalx: https://fosdem.org/submit. 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 the separate Lightning Talks track outside the developer rooms (but not for lightning talks inside devrooms).

Submissions will be reviewed as they are received on an ongoing basis. The default deadline this year is 8th December but some developer rooms have specified a slightly different date which could be a few days earlier or later so do check the Call for Papers for your track carefully!

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). You also accept the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC.

With great pleasure we can announce the following projects will have a stand at FOSDEM 2024 (3 & 4th of February).

This is the list of stands (in alphabetic order):

• AlmaLinux
• Ansible
• Automotive Grade Linux
• Badge.Team
• CentOS, RDO and OKD
• CERN Open Source
• Checkmk
• CiviCRM
• Code your Future
• Codeberg
• coreboot / flashrom / EDKII / OpenBMC
• Debian
• CalyxOS + Droidian Linux
• Fedora Project
• FOSSASIA
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• FreeCAD
• GNOME
• GNU HEALTH PROJECT
• GNU Radio with IQEngine
• Google Summer of Code 20th year stand
• Grafana
• Homebrew
• Infostand on amateur radio
• ISRG - Let's Encrypt, Prossimo & Divi Up
• Jenkins
• Joplin
• KDE
• Kodi
• La Contre-Voie
• Libreoffice
• Linux Foundation Europe
• Linux on Mobile (Mobian, Sailfish OS, PureOS, UBports, MNT Research, postmarketOS) + Ubports
• MariaDB Server
• Mastodon
• Matrix.org Foundation
• Mautic
• Minetest
• Mozilla
• Nextcloud: Self-hosted, open file sync & communication platform
• Nix and NIxOS
• NLnet Foundation
• Open Culture Foundation + Taiwan open source community
• Open Source Design
• Open-source fitness: wger + Feel
• openHAB
• OpenTofu
• Percona LLC
• PINE64
• PostgreSQL
• Proxmox Virtual Environment
• Prusa Research
• Realtime Lounge
• Rocky Linux / Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• The OpenSSL Project
• Thunderbird
• wolfSSL

We will announce the location of every stand closer to the event.

We are pleased to announce the developer rooms that will be organised at FOSDEM 2024.

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.