FOSDEM19

We proudly present the last set of speaker interviews. See you at FOSDEM this weekend!

• Corey Hulen: Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source
• Denis Roio (Jaromil): Algorithmic Sovereignty and the state of community-driven open source development. Is there a radical interface pedagogy for algorithmic governementality?
• John Garbutt: Square Kilometre Array and its Software Defined Supercomputer. ... and a very fast parallel file system
• Jon 'maddog' Hall: 2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances
• Roger Dingledine: The Current and Future Tor Project. Updates from the Tor Project
• Ron Evans: Go on Microcontrollers: Small Is Going Big. TinyGo takes the Go programming language to the "final frontier" where we could not go before... running directly on microcontrollers.

If you haven't read our previous interviews with main track speakers yet, take a look at them. It's for free and no registration necessary, just like the conference!

With only one week left until FOSDEM 2019, we have added some new interviews with our main track and keynote speakers, varying from a keynote talk about the dangers of the cloud to the use of Matrix in the French state and the inner workings of the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache:

• Allan Jude: ELI5: ZFS Caching. Explain Like I'm 5: How the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache works
• Guido Trotter and Dylan Reid: Crostini: A Linux Desktop on ChromeOS
• Kyle Rankin: The Cloud is Just Another Sun
• Lorenzo Fontana: eBPF powered Distributed Kubernetes performance analysis
• Matthew Hodgson: Matrix in the French State. What happens when a government adopts open source & open standards for all its internal communication?
• Michael Cheng: SSPL, Confluent License, CockroachDB License and the Commons Clause. Is it freedom to choose to be less free?
• Philip Tricca: The TPM2 software community. Getting started as a user, becoming a contributor
• Sage Weil: Data services in a hybrid cloud world with Ceph. Making data as portable as your stateless microservices
• Tomas Vondra: PostgreSQL vs. fsync. How is it possible that PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years, and what we'll do about it.

Our interviews page is already filling up nicely with a diverse set of main track speakers. Stay tuned for the last set of interviews next week.

As of the end of 2018, the ULB campus Solbosch is located within the Brussels Low Emission Zone (LEZ). Drivers of cars registered abroad are required to register before entering the LEZ, or risk being fined. Registration is free of charge.

More information can be found here.

If your non-geek partner and/or kids are joining you to FOSDEM, they may be interested in spending some time exploring Brussels while you attend the conference.

Like previous years, FOSDEM is organising sightseeing tours.

We have just published the second set of interviews with our main track and keynote speakers.

The following interviews give you a lot of interesting reading material about various topics, from ethics to databases and AI systems:

• Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler: Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today?. Confessions of Activists Who Try But Fail to Avoid Proprietary Software
• Deb Nicholson: Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations
• Drew Moseley: Mender - an open source OTA software update manager for IoT
• Duarte Nunes: Raft in Scylla. Consensus in an eventually consistent database
• Fernando Laudares: Hugepages and databases. working with abundant memory in modern servers
• Hong Phuc: SUSI.AI: An Open Source Platform for Conversational Web
• Jasper Nuyens: Tesla Hacking to FreedomEV!. Bringing Freedom to electric vehicle software
• Jeremie Galarneau: Fine-grained Distributed Application Monitoring Using LTTng
• Jonathan Looney: Netflix and FreeBSD. Using Open Source to Deliver Streaming Video
• Scott Hanselman: Open Source C#, .NET, and Blazor - everywhere PLUS WebAssembly

Last week, we already published our first set of speaker interviews. If you can't wait for FOSDEM 2019, get a glimpse of the talks in all these interviews. A lot more interviews are coming during the next weeks, we have only published half of them now!

With FOSDEM just around the corner, it is time for us to enlist your help.

Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers make FOSDEM happen and make it a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially for heralding during the conference, during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch. Food will be provided.

Would you like to be part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick? Sign up here! You could really help us out with the following:

• Heralding - Briefly introduce the speakers and the topics of their talks, make sure all talks end on time by giving speakers cues near the end of their time slot. Keep an eye out on room safety and report potential issues such as overcrowded rooms before it becomes more than a "potential" issue.
• Build-up - Setting up the venue on Friday: this mostly involves carrying tables to their destinations and setting them up, putting up signage, covering the walls in brown paper... in short: transform the campus into a conference venue. We need as many volunteers as possible for this task.
• Tear-down - (and cleanup) on Sunday evening: collecting beer bottles, tearing down the network, pulling brown paper off the walls, taking down the signage, stacking the rental tables in neat heaps, broom the floors etc. Basically, make sure we're welcome again next year.
• Infodesk - Available at the infodesk during the weekend: help out fellow attendees with their questions, sell t-shirts etc. Proficiency in English is a must, but if you are proficient in other languages as well, it certainly wouldn't hurt.
• Video - Capturing and recording video. Ensure the livestreams to thousands are up and running and all talks are recorded. This year we're also doing subtitling.
• Network - Deploying the network on Friday: rolling out, neatly securing and crimping UTP cables. People with experience rolling out networks and crimping cables are very welcome!
• Beer event - Be a steward at the beer event, (one of) the greatest FOSDEM-side-activities. During Friday night, the Delirium Café is ours and we organize a world-famous beer event with equally famous Belgian beers. Your role will be to check whether a visitor is indeed FOSDEM-related and sell drinks tokens.

For more information, please have a look at our volunteer FAQ

If any or all of these sound like your kind of gig, pick your task(s) at our volunteer tool, subscribe to the volunteers mailing list and keep an eye on #fosdem-volunteers on freenode (also available via webchat). Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!