FOSDEM 2023 was my first time. And I'm stunned. ??

Have you ever thought about a Burning Man festival, but for the OpenSource tech community? That's kind of what FOSDEM is in Europe. It's a broad analogy, right? ??

Hypes of people, tones of activities and gigs, techy talks, and a 2-day marathon of community gatherings.

What is FOSDEM?

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers happening in Europe each year. After 2 years in remote or dimmed-hybrid format, this year the event was back full-in on site, with thousands of people surging into the Université Libre de Bruxelles' campus.

During 2 days, it's been more than 350 hours of content in about 1000 sessions. FOSDEM is a source of inspiration for the entire OpenSource community, sharing ideas and novelty, fostering innovation and contribution in all community-based open-source projects around the world.

The content is organized into main tracks and devrooms tracks. Each devroom group talks about alike topics.

Each devroom is self-managed by a handful of community shepherds who take care of everything: apply for the devroom to appear in the FOSDEM agenda, publish the call for participation, select the talks, take care of every detail for the speakers to be comfortable in the devroom, to finally steering the devroom during all its duration.

I'm very grateful to Saúl Ibarra Corretgé and Lorenzo Miniero for steering the Real-time communications devroom this year. ??

Additionally, there were dozens of side events and community gatherings, from BoFs (Bird of Feathers) to evening meetups, to speakers' dinners.

Giving a talk at FOSDEM

A few weeks before the event, I had the extreme pleasure to receive a confirmation that my proposed talk was retained to be on the real-time communications devroom playlist.

In the last few months before submitting my talk, I learned about the W3C WebRTC Working Group and its work over the years, to shape what the WebRTC API is today: an agreed standard shared by all browsers. This market agreement allows any developer to easily implement real-time video/audio/data communication.

And that's why this standard is so important for our offer at Apizee. It enables us to provide video communication services for customer relationship scenarios to our clients in a solid and stable manner across a wide range of browsers: the newer as the older, the mainstream as the niche browsers.

In a way, this standard is instrumental to our value proposition to our client: get a better customer experience through video communication.

My talk titled plainly "W3C RTC Working Group Update" gives an insight into the life of the working group and how outside participants could come into play and influence the course of the WebRTC history.

>> Read more about my talk in the dedicated article.

I met a lot of people during these 2 days of conference. Among them, I am particularly grateful to have bumped into such a diversity of people like Mathieu Garstecki, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, Ruth Cheesley (she/her), ?? Benjamin Bellamy, Federico Cabiddu, Seth Hillbrand, Giles Heron, Daniel-Constantin Mierla, Floris van Geel, Dan Jenkins, and others: thank you for our rich ( and sometimes extended) conversations ??

What surprised me at FOSDEM

Here are some of my takeaways from this event:

Self-Organization, Emergence, and being on time

FOSDEM is a grassroots event: even if the event commodities are framed and organized by a central team, all the content emerges from the community, and the animation of each devroom also relies on a vast number of community members.

In these conditions, I might have expected some bum notes. But I have not seen even one glitch:

• every talk I went to started on time, with not one technical problem, everything seemed to flow so smoothly
• the talks I have been quite advanced and well prepared

FOSDEM is a good example of a loosely bound gathering, at a scale of thousands of visitors.

Kindness, diversity, and inclusivity

While walking across the campus and meeting new people, I could feel great respect for people for diversity and inclusivity, making both everyone special and part of the same tribe simultaneously.

Volunteers everywhere

I want to thank all the volunteers who made this FOSDEM edition possible. They spent their time in the cloakroom or serving beverages for making my experience at FOSDEM great, and I thank them for that.

I guess being part of such an event can be a thrill too. Maybe next year could I get involved, why not? ??

'Being part of' vs 'Attending'

In such conditions, I did not feel like I was attending passively to a conference. It was more like, by my presence, I was playing a role in fostering the life of the OpenSource community. I tried to be the best participant I could for making the FOSDEM a success.

So, what can you do to actively participate in the success of such an event as a visitor?

• Be kind to others
• Be curious about some topics you are not familiar with
• Be mindful of other people around you, and engage in conversations about them
• Respect speakers by paying deep attention to what they say (you're not at a conference for writing code while someone is speaking, right?)
• Ask questions at the end (even if you think they're dumb questions because some other people in the room might appreciate getting the answer as you)
• Mind your rubbish and respect the venue (Boy Scout Rule applies)
• Be friendly with the volunteers (they could be you, and you could be them!)

Not so much about software and sustainability in the content

I would have really appreciated more tracks on how developers could change the course of the world going toward a climate disaster.?There was one devroom dedicated to "Energy" but unfortunately there were too few talks related to carbon emissions or/and environmental impacts linked to digital appliances. This is a global concern, and the OpenSource community can step up and play a role in this.

I might recommend you watch the video playback of the following tasks:

• Carbon Intensity Aware Scheduling in Kubernetes by Parul Singh
• Green software engineering - Building tools and ecosystems around green software engineering by Arne Tarara
• Combatting Software-Driven Environmental Harm With Free Software by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Getting to a fossil-free internet by 2030 by Chris Adams (FOSDEM 2021 - Building a greener web)
• Open Source in Environmental Sustainability - Preserving climate and natural resources with openness by Tobias Augspurger
• Understanding the energy use of Firefox by Florian Queze

Free as in beer

And the crazier in all of that is: you can attend all the sessions for nothing. Free.

This event is funded by a handful of sponsors (with a low footprint on the event, I bearly noticed that they were sponsoring), and the sale of branded hoodies and t-shirts during the event.

My pieces of advice if you come to FOSDEM next year

• If you only want to attend the talks, don't come, just watch them over online video streaming or playback.
• But if you are OK with meeting new people, bounding with members of communities you are part of, getting accidentally into people you have not seen for ages, meeting OSS foundation organizations,?and sitting by your next OSS project leader, maybe it's worth it to get in at FOSDEM :)
• Get a plan before coming, select your 'plan A' sessions, and bookmark them into one of the scheduling apps available. Be mindful that the rooms can be far away from each other as the ULB campus is very large: check whether the sessions your selected are in the same building or not
• Stay open for some change in your agenda
• Get invited to a speaker dinner (if you are a speaker)
• Look for side events on the Internet: there might be side meetups organized nearby the event gig on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night. Some are listed in the Fringe list provided by FOSDEM, but all of them.
• Bring a flask and a power bank :)
• Reach out to your relations on your networks to see if they go to FOSDEM, you might have some good surprises.
• Pre-order your hoodie or t-shirt as the most common sizes are out of stock at the lunch break first day.
• Read Marcin Juszkiewicz piece on How to survive FOSDEM

I hope you enjoyed my notes on this year's edition, see you at the next one!