Tracks

We welcome proposals from speakers and people who are excited to give their first talk. We want seasoned professionals and volunteers, as well as fresh perspectives from new entrants. Everyone has something of value to share!

Databases

Database are everywhere from embedded devices to large data centers! This track is designed for a general audience of developers, sysadmins, DBAs and open source users to cover experiences, tools and technical details of how you use databases.

Distros

Come talk about what you have found for distros with specific use cases or pro tips. What new developments are happening? Tell us all about how you use your favorite distro!

FOSS in Daily Life

How are you using FOSS in your "everyday" life? Are there places where you find it's easier or harder to get the people around you to respect and appreciate software freedom? What areas of software are we missing in our pursuit of software freedom for all? Talks in this track can be very personal, and it's a great place to share about the particular free programs you use and why, any hacks you've found or deployed to make things work better for you, and what you feel like you are still missing -- sharing may inspire others, and we hope there can be dialog in this track so people may leave with new free solutions for their daily routines.

FOSS in and for Education

Educational institutions have a long and impactful history in the development of multiple open initiatives. In addition to free and open source software, colleges and universities have played significant roles in producing and propagating a variety of other open educational resources, such as open content, textbooks and courses, open access journals, open data, and science and research. Institutions of higher education play an essential role across several free and open source communities. As adopters, campuses occupy a unique space in--and provide a unique perspective for--the use of free and open source software at the enterprise level, often in conjunction with government and research institutions. At the same time, campus constituencies--students, staff, and faculty--provide yet another perspective as independent desktop and mobile end users. Higher education is also fertile ground for development, educating the next generation of developers while often actively creating and managing their own projects and communities of practice. The FOSS For Education Community Track would provide sessions dedicated to using, developing, and managing open resources within academic environments, from multi-institutional consortia to departmental projects. The track organizers would emphasize presentations and topics highlighting the common principles, practices, benefits, challenges, and models spanning the variety of open initiatives impacting teaching and learning environments and campus administration.

Libre Graphics

Artists and designers using free, open source software these days have many different options to help bring their creations to life. Long standing projects like Blender, Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, and Scribus provide a wide gamut of tools, but there are also many other custom built tools in the wild for graphics, audio, video, and interaction. This track will explore different ways art software users and developers make and use various open source tools and pipelines to create artwork and share it with the world.

Licensing / Legal

This is the track for proposals related to best practices around licensing and management of licensing information, discussions of recent licensing controversies and news, developments in relevant laws around the world, run-downs of important patent litigation, and the like. We'd especially welcome talks from participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics -- to discuss the day-to-day details of using copyleft licensing, obstacles facing copyleft and the future of copyleft as a strategy to advance and defend software freedom for users and developers around the world.

Linux Kernel

We've been working on this program for over thirty years, and it's still not finished. Join us to find out about some of the latest developments in this small hobby project.

P2P LoFi Futures: Peer-to-Peer and Local First

Open Source philosophies go to the next level when we extricate ourselves from the increasing technofeudalism of the current internet. Peer-to-peer (P2P) and Local-First (Lo-Fi) software allows us to take responsibility for our data and participate with one another in ecosystems we can own. P2P has many technical opportunities and challenges, and also multiple frameworks. In this track, we will be exploring both the technical architecture avenues for P2P and Lo-Fi as well as the social and philosophical aspects of P2P approaches and implementations. Dive into conflict-free replicated data types, relays, mesh networks, agent-centricity and other key aspects.

Science of Community

What can research tell us about building FOSS communities? We invite presentations from academic and industry researchers working on and with FOSS, FOSS practitioners (e.g. project leaders, community leaders, maintainers, moderators), and students who are interested in engaging with FOSS research. In this track, we will include opportunities for researchers to talk with practitioners (about their research), practitioners to talk with researchers (about their needs), and researchers to talk with researchers (for learning and collaboration). Some of the most important collaborations are those between practitioners and researchers; this can only happen when they have a chance to get to know each other.

Supporting User Groups

An important aspect of fostering community is to have users organize users groups in their local communities. When an open source project has contributors all around the planet, user groups help foster a sense of community, helps with shared learnings and nurtures community members in their journey of contributing to open source. In this track, we will discuss best practices on organizing user groups, promoting and inspiring the community, identifying the initial opportunity to start user groups, tools to offer user group organizers, identifying speakers in the community, and making user groups sustainable.

XMPP

XMPP is an extensible, foundational, and libre building block for any sort of federated communication infrastructure. Talks ranging from those new to the idea, setting up chat or social servers for small groups and families and other use cases, to those familiar with the issues such as SPAM and abuse prevention in a federated space, to technical deep dive talks about open source projects in the space and their innovations, would all be something worth covering in this track. We would strive to both appeal to the core XMPP audience and bring them to FOSSY, but also to introduce the projects and ideas to the rest of the FOSS community.

Wild card

This track is for any talks that don't fit cleanly into the rest of the tracks. Don't be shy about putting your talk here if you don't know where it should go, we can always assign it to a specific track later. We know there are many important free software projects out there that could be highlighted in a talk that aren't hosted at SFC and don't fit any of the other tracks -- this is the right place for those.