julian

These are some of the talks I'm most interested in, at FOSDEM '23.

I won't be there in person, I'll be watching some from home and in the matrix.

By Tracks or Dev Rooms | Times are UTC+1

Special Extras

• Sat 18:00 Book reading: Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream — “In this hopeful story Ada and her friends join a movement that started back in 1983. Their courageous adventure of software freedom and learning how technology works is a wonderful way to introduce young people everywhere to the joys of tinkering!” —Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation

Main Tracks (Janson, K Building)

There are a lot of good main track talks.

• Sat 11:00 Can we do an open source chip design in 45 minutes? — The state of free and open source silicon
• Sat 14:00 Linux Inlaws — A how-to on world domination by accident — the story of this podcast and its tech stack
• Sun 12:00 Rosegarden: A Slumbering Giant — How a 20-year old OSS project is still going strong — music composition and score software
• Sun 12:00 Practical Computerized Home Automation — “Home automation is an elusive technology — often desired, rarely achieved. This talk explores a successful ten-year home automation deployment, outlining the challenges that derail many attempts. It will cover technology choices, programing basics, and a dozen successful applications.”
• Sun 13:00 Podcasting 2.0: it's all about Interoperability — How Podcasting 2.0 will save the Open Internet
• Sun 14:00 Decentralized Social Media with Hachyderm — The unexpected Mastodon cooperative that broke Silicon Valley
• Sun 15:00 Running a Hybrid Event with Open Source — The Plumbers Experience
• Sun 15:00 Clear skies, no clouds in sight. Running a 14 person company on only free software. — They say it can't be done, they say it's too much work. But is it really? After 5 years of running Prehensile Tales on entirely free software I think I can answer this.
• Sun 16:00 Matrix 2.0 — How we’re making Matrix go voom
• Sun 16:00 The End of Free Software — How the Cloud threatens FOSS and what we can do about it

And one of the Keynotes I'd like to call out:

• Sun 17:00 Open Source Software at NASA

Public Code and Digital Public Goods devroom

My first impressions: “Only half a day? There's so much more to do!” and, “Where's the ed-tech?” Surely ed-tech — and at the very least the education it supports — is firmly in the area of “public goods.”

• Sun 10:15 Public Money? Public Code! in Europe — A policy brief of the state of play of Free Software in the European Union
• Sun 11:40 The New EU Interoperable Europe Act and the Reuse of Software in Public Administration — Implications for OSS in Public Administrations > Surely there's room for cross-over with ed-tech here? For a start, at the level of regional government education departments sharing infrastructure that they provide to schools.

Legal and Policy Issues devroom

• Sat 10:35 A Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) is unjust like proprietary software — Thinking carefully about services
• Sat 14:00 Learning From the Big Failures To Improve FOSS Advocacy and Adoption — How Are Big Companies Benefiting So Much from FOSS, and Individuals So Little? — the story and future of FOSS advocacy strategy
• Sat 15:00 Reckoning with new app store changes: Is now our chance? — Recent legal and policy developments around app stores and what they mean for free software
• Sat 15:30 How to get public administrations to use more FOSS — “... Open Source Business Alliance [worked] with the German Ministry of Interior ... to remove existing barriers and ... reform ... contracts. Additionally a survey ... revealed ... problems that companies face when offering Open Source Software or corresponding services to public administrations.”
• Sat 16:00 EU alternative to app stores — Guardian Project tooted: “At #FOSDEM, @marcel_kolaja will present the #EU pilot project to look into open-sourcing the EU's apps and publishing them outside of #BigTech including on @fdroidorg. @eighthave will join, talking about how F-Droid will help pull the EU towards #FreeSoftware. Join us!”

Energy devroom

Note: some on line, others on campus

• Sat 11:15 Challenges in Home Energy Management — How to best use your own PV-generated power — real-world issues deploying openHAB for EV charging, heat pump and white goods
• Sat 12:00 EVerest: AC and DC electric vehicle charging with open source software and hardware
• Sat 12:30 European Eichrecht — E-Mobility with Love & Security — “... From a software developer's point of view the German calibration law is not so much about measuring energy correctly or invoicing the correct prices, but a first step towards a more modern zero trust architecture for the e-mobility charging infrastructure. ...”
• Sat 15:10 V2GLiberty: The open stack that could — How we enable EV owners to be ahead of the industry, with open source software — Vehicle-to-grid charging (V2G), also referred to as bidirectional charging, using HomeAssistant, FlexMeasures and NextCloud ... “Soon, the commercial world will roll out more bidirectional chargers and cars..., as well as home energy management solutions which lock users into specific vendor relationships (where the car is just one of the managed services). It's crucial to provide an open-source alternative, to provide independence for users, and to inspire startups.”
• Sat 16:05 4 Years of Energy Management with openHAB — A personal story about smart homes, PV systems and EVs

Matrix devroom

Matrix is awesome! Lots to hear about: more than ten talks in this track, in addition to the main track Matrix 2.0 talk. As I follow Matrix closely I am already aware of some of the things being presented, especially its technical developments. Here I single out presentations about how matrix is connecting people in the real world.

• Sun 11:05 Widgets in the “Sovereign Workplace” for the German public sector
• Sun 12:15 Bridging ActivityPub with Kazarma — Interoperability and “beyond-chat” Matrix
• Sun 12:35 All your base are belong to us — A crazy ride through lots of matrix projects — featuring Matrix the movie and highlighting the diversity of matrix clients and bridging — I originally didn't have this on my list but ended up watching it and enjoying the presenter's fast paced and humorous style.
• Sun 14:30 Building a social app on top of Matrix — Fighting surveillance capitalism for fun and profit
• Sun 15:00 Decentralizing moderation — Mjölnir for all

Sovereign Cloud

• Sat 13:05 From Zero to Hero with Solid — Lessons learned making apps using the Solid Protocol
• Sat 13:50 Operate First community cloud — A blueprint for a sovereign cloud?
• Sat 14:40 The Co-operative Cloud — Public interest infrastructure
• Sat 15:45 The Importance of Collaborative Applications for European Digital Sovereignty — Progress and challenges of alternatives facing the BigTechs
• Sat 18:25 Effective management of Kubernetes resources for cluster admins — about using Kustomize.io in Operate First Community Cloud

BSD devroom

• Sat 11:00 Game of Trees Daemon — A Git repository server for OpenBSD and other systems — because I have a personal interest, knowing the speaker from our work on development of Subversion, and also having done some work using libgit2 and using git-svn, and being interested in interoperability.

Collaboration and Content Management

Lots about deploying Nextcloud etc., which might come in useful for building Open EdTech.

Lightning Talks

• Sat 16:40 Passbolt — Open source password manager for teams — I am interested to contrast Passbolt with Bitwarden which currently is my recommendation for a self-hosted password manager for individuals which does have a “team” sharing feature.
• Sun 10:20 Breaking away from Big Tech — Using open source infrastructure in a convenient way
• Sun 11:20 A GitLab forge for all teachers and students in France? — A project of the French Ministry of Education
• Sun 11:40 FOSSbot: An open source and open design educational robot
• Sun 14:20 Self-hosting for non-coders? — The open-source approach — about Caprover (and Gardens built on it), a container-based self-hosting framework. Until now I had been thinking Yunohost (not container-based) was the leading contender; it will be interesting to compare them.

Other Fun Stuff

• Sat 17:30 Become a rockstar using FOSS! — Or at least use FOSS to write and share music for fun! — “... talking about the different applications I've used to compose, orchestrate, process, mix, master and so on ... also talk a bit of the community aspects ...”
• Sun 10:40 Grottocenter — An open source database for cavers

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