My Impressions⌗

This was my first FOSDEM. My immediate impression was how busy it seemed. Catching the Eurostar, I noticed two people preparing their slides on kernel development and Julia respectively. Could the group of friends on the Brussels metro, trading Arduinos, be attending? Most likely, I think I saw them at RSECon, I regret not asking. The bus quickly transitioned from standing room only to the kind of crowding that persuaded those waiting at the stops to not even attempt boarding. Not often that you here phrases “kernel panic” or “Postgres migrations” on public transport. Even rarer to hear both.

That atmosphere grew stronger at ULB. Such a density of people. It took quite a while to get used to how unusual it feels to be surrounded by people into FOSS. I’m quite used to being the odd one out or a bit of a curiosity. Even in research and RSE circles I get strong senses of “open source is good but…”, “Linux is only for servers” and “the proprietary solution is the serious option”.

I think there was a diversity of people, or perhaps, diversity for a tech event. There was a gender imbalance, which certainly isn’t unusual for conferences I attend. This was less pronounced in certain devrooms, which might be evidence that those communities put more effort into diversity or feel more welcoming. However, I did get an overall sense that FOSDEM is friendly, welcoming and inclusive and I certainly hope everyone felt safe and comfortable being themselves.

Diversity also applies to the devrooms. Any two people following the devroom tracks (which is what I mostly did) can, and probably do, have completely different conferences. Rooms organises around topics or projects. There are those with high-level, philosophical, meta-discussion about what we are doing, how we interact, what does FOSS mean anyway? On the other hand, there are rooms focused on narrow, specialist areas of development. Perhaps somewhere in the middle are the rooms for domain areas (HPC, mobile) or your favourite language/framework.

FOSDEM felt free and chaotic, which is more of a blessing than a curse. In fact, I suspect the open, group organisation is part of what makes it operate so smoothly. I found there was a surprising lack of ego. My experience of academic conferences, from my postgraduate days, was very much built around reputation and authority. Big name speakers would often take liberties and run over time. I’ve even seen people refuse to stop after they’ve been told to leave the stage, “just five more minutes”. It causes problems for those (usually volunteers) trying to keep time, and the poor presenters who have to follow.

The rooms I went to ran surprisingly smoothly. If you forget what time your talk is, or can’t find the room, there is no one sent to find you. Despite that, I didn’t see any talks that were missed. There was only one close call, due to the speaker being caught off guard by many flights of stairs. Reflecting on that, I wonder if it works so well without top-down authority because everyone feels so invested. So much of FOSDEM is crowd organised. Everyone is there with a sincere desire to share and it fosters a strong sense of community. To be selfish or take advantage would let you down and hurt your reputation; your prior accolades can’t save you here.

What I did⌗

Before FOSDEM had started, I was getting involved in minor ways. Some colleagues and I offered our help to devrooms we were interested in, and submitted talk proposals. Those rooms which could do with more hands told us how to get involved. I helped review proposals and select talks for the HPC, Big Data & Data Science devroom. I also signed up to help operate the camera at the Python devroom, which I then forgot about until I was reminded a day or two before the conference 🤦.

My main activity was presenting my talk. I was quite nervous about talking. I went to look at the room a few hours before my talk and was intimidated at how large and popular it seemed. Maybe that was a mistake. I went for a walk, ate a waffle and tried to keep a sensible perspective. When I arrived to settle in before my talk, it didn’t seem so scary.

I was certainly less nervous than I have been at conference previously. A lot of that, I’m sure, is because I felt I knew what I was talking about and was confident in what I was going to say. Sometimes, especially if you are giving a talk out of obligation, that isn’t the case.

Looking back, I feel my talk went quite well. I think I forgot to say some things, but that doesn’t matter so much. More importantly, I think I paced things well and the audience seemed interested and engaged. Enough people said that they liked the talk to convince me they weren’t just being nice. I’m left feeling more confident about talking in general, and encouraged to talk again next year.

You can view a recording of my talk on the FOSDEM website. The slides can be seen on GitHub and are also archived on Zenodo, 10.5281/zenodo.10624870.

I finished Sunday in the Python devroom. I was controlling the camera feed, monitoring audio levels and holding the “X minutes left” prompts for speakers. These jobs are quite manageable for one person. Especially because the FOSDEM video team had set up the equipment and developed a webapp where you can change scenes and check the audio volume. It is a good feeling to help deliver the event. It turned out the Python room was short-handed. If I was more attentive I might have realised and helped more. However, thanks mostly to Marc-Andre, Tatiana, and David there were no problems and the talks all ran smoothly.

Ambitions⌗

I definitely want to go to FOSDEM again next year. This year, I did manage to get involved in devrooms. However, splitting my effort between multiple rooms was a bit tricky and feels suboptimal. Perhaps next year I will try to be more closely involved in a single room. That way I might also be able to have one day focusing on a particular room and the other free to see everything else.

Towards the end of Sunday I discovered there was a large area of FOSDEM behind a building, which, up to that point, I had completely missed. This included the café where all of the Club Mate was coming from. At that point I was too scared to try it, but I feel that is a goal for next time.

I spent almost all of my time going to talks. Outside of that, I took a brief tour around the stands and spoke to people representing projects I like and use (Nextcloud, Kodi, Gnome). I think there is a lot of more social hacking/development activity going on. I didn’t see or get involved in any of this, so that might be something to try and discover in the future.

My picks⌗

I wrote another post about my highlights from FOSDEM.