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

Key dates / New updates

• Conference dates 4-5 February, 2023 In person
• Community DevRoom date: TBC
• Submission deadline: Friday 1st December
• Announcement of selected talks: Thursday 15th December 
• You must be available in person to present your talk
• Talk submissions should be 30 mins and this should include Q&A time.

IN MORE DETAIL 

The Community DevRoom will be back at FOSDEM 2024. Our goals in running this DevRoom are to:

• Educate those who are primarily software developers on community-oriented topics that are vital in the process of software development, e.g. effective collaboration
• Provide concrete advice on dealing with squishy human problems
• FOSS Projects are made up of people and, in turn, these people form a community of practice, or purpose. 
• This devroom will provide concrete, useful advice on how to best enable volunteer contributors, community leaders, and folks just starting their journeys with open source to be successful, with the intended outcome that more free and open source software gets written and used. 

TALK TOPICS

Here are some topics we are interested in hearing more about this year:

• Establishing good community governance practices to ensure an equal playing field for all contributors
• Deep diving into the rise of open source practices and OSPO creation in academia and government
• Mapping the landscape for sustaining open source communities when many large corporations have discontinued their investments in open source over the past year
• Exploring the impact of licensing changes on the open source ecosystem, community, and businesses
• Applying the transferable skills we have learned as open source community participants to other areas, e.g. what should I explore doing next if working in the open source space is no longer a viable option for me due to ongoing layoffs
• Creating local-first communities and authentic and sustainable connections with contributors who are not able to attend in person
• Sustainability in FOSS from a community perspective, e.g. keeping contributors motivated and able to pay their bills and addressing maintainer burnout
• Self-care in our communities, for both community members and community leaders, e.g. how are we all dealing with burnout and the ongoing impact of the pandemic
• Community Management best practices

Amongst many others….Again, these are just suggestions. We welcome proposals on any aspect of community building!

HOW TO SUBMIT A TALK

• Head to the FOSDEM 2024 pretalx website. This has replaced Pentabarf !

• Follow the instructions to create an account.
• Once logged in, select “submit a CFP”.
• Your submission must include the following information: 
  • Proposal title
  • Track – Select Community from the drop down list 
  • Abstract
  • Description
  • Add any other details as needed to the Submission notes.
• New Feature ( optional) : Session Image Use this if you want an illustration to go with your proposal. Please do not upload files larger than 10.0MB!
• Additional speaker
• Click Continue or you can save and come back to it
  • About your proposal: Which open source license do you use?
    • FOSDEM is an open-source software conference, please specify which OSI approved license your proposal uses.
  • Extra review material, only shown to reviewers (not published when scheduled)
  • Extra Contact details (optional)
• Click Continue or you can save and come back to it
  • Finally tell us your name 
  • Biography 
  • Availability

If you need to get in touch with the organisers or program committee of the Community DevRoom, email us at community-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

Shirley Bailes, Laura Czajkowski and Leslie Hawthorn,- Community DevRoom Co-Organizers