FOSDEM 2025: Nix and NixOS devroom

Events
1

Hey all, :wave:

FOSDEM 2025 is slowly but surely approaching us again, this year with a special 25th anniversary edition, and they’ve just announced the call for devrooms. With that, we’d like to see who’s willing to help us organize and submit a devroom. The previous 2 iterations can be considered a success, and we’d love for this trend to continue.

Key dates

  • 2024-10-09T22:00:00Z - deadline for developer room proposals
  • 2024-10-20T22:00:00Z - accepted developer rooms announced
  • 2024-10-29T23:00:00Z - developer rooms issue Calls for Participation.
  • 2024-11-30T23:00:00Z - deadline for Call for Participation
  • 2024-12-14T23:00:00Z - developer rooms publish complete schedules

Call for Nix/NixOS devroom organizers

Organizing a FOSDEM devroom can be a fun yet challenging endeavor. It’s hectic, fast, and sometimes even messy. Even so, seeing people show up to speak about their favorite subjects within the Nix ecosystem, and having a room full of people closely paying attention to what the speaker is saying, makes that all worth it.

We’d like to extend this opportunity to the entire community. If you think this might be something you want to do, please, join us in this endeavor. And if you’re afraid you wouldn’t be up to the task, don’t be, you’ll be joining a team of people that have already acquired a bit of experience in organizing events, including the previous devrooms at FOSDEM, and we’re not shy of sharing that knowledge. You might even come with new insights that we haven’t thought of before. :wink:

If this sounds interesting to you, leave a message showing your interest, and we’ll get in contact with you. The rest of this post provides additional information on what you can roughly expect the responsibilities to be.

Call for devrooms

Devrooms are FOSDEM’s bread and butter. These rooms are dedicated to specific open-source and free software projects, filled to the brim with talks. Those talks can range from in-depth technical analysis, to discussing a particular RFC, to having general community discussion. A great reason for the community to gather in one place.

Currently, we’re looking for people to help us submit and refine the proposal for a devroom.

We’ll be looking for the following types of people to help during the event, in case the devroom is accepted.

  • one (or more) volunteers to take responsibility for the devroom, so we can rotate and take breaks
  • one (or more) volunteers to manage the microphone handover and camera through the day, full instructions will be supplied

If you can’t make it to the event physically, you can still help us with the following.

  • one (or more) volunteers to help us decide on which talks to accept
  • one (or more) volunteers to help us create marketing material for the devroom
  • one (or more) volunteers to help us

Call for stands

FOSDEM also offers open-source and free software projects a so-called stand. These are tables that are clustered together during the event, allowing the project to show what it can do to a wider audience than just those that show up during the devroom.

In FOSDEM’s own words:

You can share information, demo software, interact with your users and developers, give away goodies, sell merchandise or accept donations. Anything is possible!

We’ll also be trying for a stand again this year. If you’d like to help out with that, help is appreciated in the following areas.

  • one (or more) volunteers to take responsibility for the stand, so we can rotate and take breaks
  • one (or more) volunteers to help create demo’s
  • one (or more) volunteers to provide a laptop preloaded with the demo’s, and perhaps a screen to set up on the stand
  • one (or more) volunteers to help create t-shirt and sticker designs
  • one (or more) generous sponsors to help with funding stickers and t-shirts

Fringe events

An idea that popped into my mind whilst writing this, we could also host a fringe event. These are self-hosted and managed events that just happen to be around the time that FOSDEM is happening. Perhaps we could hold a BruNix meetup around the same time? @yvan-sraka

Shameless mentioning of people that I recall showing previous interest in organizing. :blush:
@thufschmitt @matthewcroughan @JulienMalka @RaitoBezarius @plmercereau @nbathum @mschwaig @cardboardturkey @yvan-sraka @tomberek

11 Likes
2

I will be going to FOSDEM for sure, and I spent a lot of time at the booth this year.
I’d be happy to be involved again and have more responsibility this year, potentially also around organizing the devroom.

2 Likes
3

I was at the booth this year, happy to help with both devroom and booth next fosdem. :slight_smile:

1 Like