Call for Speakers: FOSDEM 2024 / Nix and NixOS

Announcements
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For the second year in a row, Nix and NixOS will have a dedicated devroom at FOSDEM! FOSDEM is one of the largest open-source software development conferences in Europe. It will take place next year on February 3rd and 4th in Brussels, Belgium - and attendance is as always free of charge. Our devroom will take place on Sunday morning (February 4th). On behalf of the devroom managers, we’re looking forward to see many of you there!

Call for Participation / Speakers

We are looking for speakers who’d like to present about the free / open source software ecosystem surrounding Nix and NixOS. Do you have a cool use case for Nix or NixOS? Have you built some interesting FLOSS tool that you’d like the community to hear about? Please send us your submissions!

Talks can either be lightning talks (5 mins) or full-featured talks (20 mins + 5 mins for Q&A).

We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and all levels of experience with Nix and NixOS. If you have something interesting to show to the world, it does not matter whether you’ve been contributing to nixpkgs for years or whether you’re a new Nix user.

Speakers will need to be present in person at the event, remote presentations are unfortunately not possible this year.

For reference, the devroom schedule from last year is also available.

How to submit

The CFP is hosted by FOSDEM themselves. Head over to Pretalx, their CFP platform, and follow the instructions on the landing page. Most fields are optional, just make sure that you:

  • Set the “Track” to “Nix and NixOS”
  • Fill in the “Proposal Title” and “Abstract”. You can also put more detailed information and links in the “Description” field.
  • Indicate in the “Submission Notes” whether you are submitting a lightning talk or a full presentation.

Should Pretalx fail you, feel free to send us a mail with the relevant information to nix-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

Important dates

  • Thursday 2023-12-07 23:59 CET: deadline for submitting talk proposals.
  • Friday 2023-12-15 (expected): accepted talks announced.
  • Saturday 2024-02-03: FOSDEM begins.
  • Sunday 2024-02-04 (morning): Nix and NixOS devroom scheduled.

Contact us

Feel free to ask any questions in this thread, or to contact directly one of the devroom organizers:

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This is an insane accomplishment! Super THANKS to you all for making this happen <3

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I’d be interested in holding an introductory talk that first demos basic usage of Nix for personal and development use and then drills down into the concepts (store, derivations, builders, profiles) that make it all work. This would be a full presentation. I’m aware many people have tried this before, but I’ve never been satisfied with the level of explanation so far, the only thing that came close was Nix: What Even is it Though?

Do you think something like that would be interesting or are you looking more for detailed and specific talks that are targeted at experienced Nix users?

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Introductory talks are definitely something we’d like to see! There is almost certainly going to be some folks at FOSDEM who have never used Nix and want to hear more about what it is and how to use it Also, the talks will be recorded, so hopefully introductory talks can be relevant later outside of the event too.

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The deadline is in two weeks, and we still need more talks! Please remember to send your proposals, and feel free to ask us if you’re worried about whether your topic is interesting enough / suitable for the event / …

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One week left! Don’t forget to submit your talks. We need more of them!

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The CFP is now closed, thank you to everyone who submitted proposals! We had a total of 20 submissions, and we’re now in the process of reviewing them and figuring out the hard problem of which talks we can fit in our limited schedule (Sunday 09:00-12:45).

For all the proposal authors, expect to hear from us within the next few days!

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Quick update here: We’re done selecting the talks, we’re just waiting for a few speakers to confirm (we asked some of them to change their session type, so we need to make sure that they are OK with that). We should be able to announce the program in a few days.