fosdem Logo The Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting (FOSDEM) conference will be held once again in Belgium at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles on February 4 & 5, 2017. For those not familiar with the event, it’s the largest general open source conference in Europe—perhaps the largest in the world—taking place annually in Brussels since 2001. (And, if you want to get pedantic about it, you could say FOSDEM was born in 2000 as the OSDEM conference.)

The conference has always been an important one for Red Hatters, with our employees representing the community in several ways: teaching in the exhibition area, giving talks as part of the main program, organizing of FOSDEM itself and organizing Developer Rooms. This year is no exception, as you can see from all the Developer Rooms we’re helping to organize!

fosdem program

Developer Rooms are community-organized content tracks focusing on particular topics, such as Legal & Policy in FOSS or Linux Distributions. Running in parallel to the main track conference sessions, these breakout spaces allow open source projects or individuals interested in topic areas to convene, network, and learn from one another.

This year, we’re excited to be involved in 12 of the more than 30 Developer Rooms planned for FOSDEM 2017. We’re hoping to see old friends at FOSDEM—and make many more new ones—so we hope you’ll submit to one or more of these open Calls for Papers:

  • Cloud & Monitoring—Automating cloud deployments, monitoring containerized services, #monitoringlove and more….

  • Community—Focusing on the human elements in software development: collaboration, leveling-up, finding and motivating volunteers, etc.

  • Containers & Microservices—Developing and administering microservices, Open Container Initiative projects, Docker, rkt, and all other topics currently trending to revolutionize your IT infrastructure.

  • Desktops—Writing applications, interoperability amongst desktop environments and cross-platform development CDE to XFCE.

  • Distributions—Collaborating development across distributions, build/test/release, lifecycle management and any and all other things distro-oriented.

  • Free Java—Bringing together developers across the span of Free Java projects, the theme for this year’s DevRoom is “everything in its right place.”

  • Legal & Policy Issues—Exploring the legal and public policy frameworks that govern FLOSS development, including topics related to software patents, privacy and restrictions on cryptography and other security development and research.

  • SDN & NFV—Networking and switching at the low-level, NFV management and orchestration, the software defined datacenter and the many projects in this arena.

  • Security—Covering protocol and implementation vulnerabilities (and mitigation techniques) for widely used Internet protocols and software, and theoretical and practical cryptographic algorithms and techniques.

  • Software Defined Storage—Seeking real-world use cases and stories from the trenches, this DevRoom also aims to gather the community’s thoughts on the future of SDS.

  • Valgrind—Combining hackfest space with time for talks, you can find all things Valgrind on offer here.

  • Virtualization and IaaS—Organized in conjunction with the Xen Project, this devroom will feature session topics such as open source hypervisors and virtual machine managers as well as Infrastructure-as-a-Service projects.

fosdem fedora team

None of these Developer Rooms in your area of interest? There’s 20+ more rooms seeking speakers. You can find a full listing of all Developer Rooms & their Calls for Papers on the FOSDEM site.

And, if you cannot join us in person, the Developer Rooms and all other sessions from FOSDEM will be livestreamed. Stay tuned for information on viewing the event from afar!

[2008 FOSDEM program photo courtesy of Jesús Corrius. Fedora 2009 team photo courtesy of liknus.]