Reflections on FOSDEM

This is the last of the articles from this year's FOSDEM and, though the other articles were about particular talks, what follows are my personal impressions from this engaging conference. This was my first FOSDEM. I've known about it for years, but never been before; in retrospect I regret that, because it's not like any other conference I've ever been to.

The first huge difference is that it's free to attend, and fiercely proud of it ("FOSDEM is free. Not just free as in software, but free as in beer, though this being Belgium, the beer is not free."). You don't register to attend, you just show up. Yes, a contribution is asked for, and yes, the queue to donate €25 (and get a T-shirt) can stretch round the block, but there's no pressure put on you to contribute.

The second oddity is that although the FOSDEM staff arrange a substantial core conference — six main talk streams, on and off — most of what happens at FOSDEM isn't actually organized by FOSDEM. There are over forty developer rooms; FOSDEM makes sure the rooms are ready, the A/V equipment is working, and records the talks on video, but arranging the talk program is left to the teams whose room proposals have been accepted. Nearly sixty different organizations had stands at the venue. The Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions are like the developer rooms, but even less formal. There are also the lightning talks; a room that is set aside so people who have something to show but don't want to do a full talk get fifteen minutes on stage to say what they can. An amazing amount of collaborative activity happens at FOSDEM simply because everyone is there, and FOSDEM makes it easy for it to happen.

That means a lot of people; some eight thousand attended FOSDEM over the course of the weekend. Some of those I spoke to weren't planning to go to a single talk. They were there purely to meet fellow collaborators and hack on their projects; they intended to watch the talks on video later. These are people who spend long working weeks coding professionally, and what they do on their time off and at their own expense is exactly the same thing, but on stuff they love, with people they respect. When a significant number of the attendees all show up in the same place at the same time, such as for the opening or closing keynotes, you really get a sense for how many people are there.

One of the reasons you don't get a feel for how many people are at FOSDEM until that point is that the conference is quite widely geographically distributed. Yes, it's all on the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), but that's not small, and although FOSDEM doesn't use all of it, what it does use is fairly spread out. So quite a lot of time is spent walking from one building to another; you follow the ant trails like everyone else, but I still found myself looking at a map each time I moved, for most of day one. It can take ten minutes walking to get all the way across the conference, so when deciding which talks to listen to, where they are is nearly as important as when. As ever, the organizers try to hack to improve people's lives; this year saw the first incarnation of http://nav.fosdem.org (no link, as it's no longer up), a mobile-friendly app designed to get you from talk to talk as efficiently as possible. I tried it, and it was clearly a first incarnation; things like this only get better. The free scheduling and map app on F-Droid was magnificent, though, and kept up with all the room changes. I didn't bother with a paper schedule the whole weekend.

There is a downside to this popularity. FOSDEM can't magically resize the rooms that ULB provides. The conference is aware that the big hall, Janson, is really too big for anything except the opening and closing ceremonies, and that most of the other rooms are too small. They have a system of FULL/OPEN notices for the doors of the particularly-desirable rooms to indicate when a room is at legal capacity, after which time it's one-in-one-out; the queues for entry can get rather long. In the opening keynote they named the Python and Ruby development rooms as being well known for quickly filling up; if you're not there early for those, you're probably not getting in.

FOSDEM definitely has its own way of doing things. We were told in no uncertain terms that the WiFi provided was IPv6-only. A second network, with the subtle SSID "FOSDEM-ancient", was provided for devices that couldn't run IPv6, but we were encouraged to agitate for IPv6-compatible devices ("bang on the heads of those responsible, particularly if they're here").

I spoke to several young Germans who told me how professionally the Chaos Communications Congress video-records its conferences, but FOSDEM proudly displayed its unique render farm (seen at left in a photo from the closing keynote); I was told the organizers were able to video the whole of FOSDEM for less than CCC spent on a single room. They were even more proud of the core router and server setup ("this is a lot better than last year's, because it's not balancing on chairs").

One serious event, the discovery during the conference of a systematic attempt to harvest Google account details from participants via a malicious WiFi network, was efficiently dealt with, and Google was notified about the affected accounts.

It is a conference that people love. Those who organize it, those who volunteer at it, and those who attend, seem alike to feel really strongly about the conference. Many who are there attend at their own expense, using their own free time to do so. If I may be forgiven for gazing balefully at my fellow Britons for a minute, I've never felt so surrounded by young Europeans — people who came from all corners of the continent, got by in a whole variety of languages not least of which was English, and collaborated as if national borders were not particularly relevant to them. I still can't believe my country desires not to be a part of that.

FOSDEM is a conference where the opening address isn't given by some high-profile industry figure, but by an impassioned young Bulgarian hacker who spends five minutes of the time talking very movingly about her mother's experiences as a COBOL programmer in 1990s Bulgaria. It is the only time I've ever been in the same room as a thousand other people all of whom know how to put their phones on silent, and remember to do so. FOSDEM is different, and it is fun. You should consider going.

[Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for making this article possible.]