Even if not watching the talks (gotta admit, I'm a bit tired of watching streams of talks by now...), I find just browsing through the schedule and seeing what communities I'm not involved with are getting up to really interesting each year. Even if it's clearly just a subset of things it's a nice point to start search further.
Yep :-) When I went last year I decided to just pretty much camp out in specific dev rooms and that worked a lot better. It had grown to a point where trying to flit from room to room was pretty much an exercise in frustration.
Me too. Shout out to the orga team who always provides cheap (but great!) sandwiches and mate. That's FOSDEM to me. That and the nerdy discussions in the rain while waiting in the food truck queue.
The amount of free edge-of-industry information out there is staggering, can't wait till I get to browse the collection and pick and choose talks to watch.
You can find FOSDEM 2020 recordings on Youtube[0]. Despite my misgivings about Google, I certainly do use their product for this. Youtube is insanely good for teeing up technical talks to watch.
YouTube is so good that I frequently forget it's a Google product. It's a feather in their cap that they've let it remain mostly separate (minus that brief dalliance with Google+ integration).
I hope they don't see it to much as an industry event, but keep it focussed on the FOSS community. This is what makes the Charme of the event - you get all sorts of content, mostly about technology, less about tech marketing. Especially also from projects with little to no financial objectives.
Ah yes, I didn't mean to imply that the event was for industry -- I meant that it was at the cutting edge (which is normally the leading edge of industry) since it's full of hackers and builders.
I also do not want it to become an "industry event" in that sense, I enjoy it 10x more than I do the bajillion Kubecons. I was also referring to not just FOSDEM, but there's PostgresConf/Open, USENIX, OpenZFS, InfoQ, JSConf, Strange Loop -- there is so much information out there that it's exhausting but absolutely to our benefit.
As companies go through their possibly short-lived tryst with true open source (before everyone starts reverting to shareware), they are sharing big ambitious projects that they're working on, and giving interesting talks on the architecture, motivations, etc.
TinyML Asia 2020 was wonderfully executed virtually. The amount of truly breakthrough research and development offered is astounding! It is also quite possible to make connections and discuss people's work and ideas post fact much more easily nowadays. I must say the Q&A feature works quite well in a videoconference setting. Everyone can see the questions - there is no chance of them being misheard.
For smaller settings a live (virtual) discussion is also remarkably workable and useful. Never thought I could easily chitchat with one of the authors of the Agile manifesto, or of the head of the largest LoRaWAN network in the world, etc...
Serving the FOSS developer community is FOSDEM's goal. We live by its grace.
That is more than just fluffy talk. I believe FOSDEM to currently be fairly well positioned to keep that focus:
- I like to hope/think FOSDEM's financial situation is close to an optimum: healthy enough to guarantee our editorial independence, but not interesting enough to attract vultures sophisticated enough to distract us from our goal.
- Our formal structure should shield us from takeover attempts fairly well.
- I have every reason trust my fellow board members. We are individuals with alternatives. We actively choose to convert part of our energy into volunteering for FOSDEM instead of into money in our bank accounts.
- We have a physical allergy to tech marketing rear end talk.
- Each of us can tap into an incredibly talented and powerful pool of community allies.
- We actually try to look at opportunities and pitfalls now and then. That probably distiguishes us from >95% of all organisations.
As far as I remember, it's a first time there are separate devrooms for Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It's been 10 years now, is it me or it feels like a waste of efforts ?
Fosdem is a really great event. No corporate (or too much) involvement. A true volunteer run conference with great talks, great people and great Belgian Beer :-)
The organizers of the previous RUST devroom (2018, 2019, 2020) decided that we won't be organizing it this year as a huge part of FOSDEM is getting people in the same room and being able to create face to face discussions on the back of the
Rooms are organized by volunteers of the communities. Typically there was a shortage of physical rooms which doesn't exist that much inna virtual event (still they wouldn't take everything I assume and haven't counted if/how much they grew)
If the is no Rust room, it seems that nobody from the Rust community saw need to hold these kinds of gatherings. So maybe an item for your to-do list to push for next year. (And as others have said in this thread: previously it was part of Mozilla and given Mozilla's change of priorities recently, I assume they stepped back)
A rust room was actually the first thing I was looking for. But I can understand that not everyone shares our enthusiasm, because there are also a lot of other cool things to talk about.
Go, Kotlin, Zig, Python, JavaScript have devrooms.
It seems there is one Rust talk in the Mozilla room. But this is way less than for the other languages.
I wonder why Rust is somewhat underrepresented at FOSDEM. Or maybe my view is totally biased from reading too much HN...
Despite, now that Mozilla does not maintain Rust anymore, I think this really should get a separate devroom.
Edit: Downvote? Why? What is controversial about what I said? Really curious. That Rust should get a separate devroom? Not relevant enough? But this is even what I considered in the sentence before.
Or are there more Rust talks and I didn't found them? Actually, there seem to be some more, but still less than for other languages: https://fosdem.org/2021/search/?q=rust
In normal times, giving a talk at a conference is a good excuse to go to a conference you want to attend--and many orgs won't generally let folks attend an event if they're not doing something specific there. In the current circumstances, a lot of people are a lot less inclined to put the effort to create one more video among the doubtless thousands of videos being created for conferences. I know I'm still doing some but definitely doing fewer submittals than I would normally.
Excited to see plenty of WebRTC talks in there. 2020 was a huge boost for WebRTC but I think 2021 will be the year for lots of innovation around it now that the tooling has started to mature and the browser vendors are actively on it.
Based on the blog post linked here in the comments, the talk themselves are actually already prerecorded. The live aspect will only be the Q/A with the speaker and a host.
Does that change how people will perceive the conference?
Not a lot. At FOSDEM (at least for the last 10y, I have been attending), you have four kinds of talks:
* Lighting talks/short talks: Most of the time, you may not have Q/A if the speaker talks too long but you can catch they off stage to talk about it. So you keep the live aspect.
* Big/Popular talks/Main roam (Janson): You don't ask Q/A during those presentations so it would not change a lot.
* Mid-sized talks/roams: It depends on the speaker how much interaction, he wants.
* Tiny roams: There you will loose the jokes and the fun going on with well-know speakers in their communities.
I think we will see less informal/fun talks because the streaming format does not easily allow the spur of the moment joke/question. The quality of the speaker will really during those Q/A moments but on a time management side, the good news is that you have less time-keeping to do with a prerecorded streaming event if each talks has his channel.
IMHO that's generally a good model: it reduces issues with the setup or speakers internet connections, and allows the speaker to stress-free answer questions in chat during the talk.
It can make sense to have a real-time portion so that attendees get more of a sense of attending a live "event." But I agree that my experience as someone helping to run some events is that it makes sense to pre-record most sessions. There's a lot less sense of working without a safety net, fewer problems, and more time to focus on making those parts that are live go as smoothly as possible.
For the ccc conference rc3, linus said something in direction of 'lets not do that again'.
At least for me, i go to Fosdem for all the talks of course but also to see people, dring belgien beer, eat, freeze, have wet shoes and enjoy the sun on the second day for 1-2 hours.
I don't know what is with all the negativity here in the toplevel comments.
I've downloaded the Android app and bookmarked quite a few talks that I'm looking forward to.
I'm looking forward to the open source CAD talks. There is one about the Linkstage3 branch of FreeCAD that will go over some of the new features added there and those improvements will eventually end up in the mainline branch.
Seems to be hard to create a website where you can login or maintain a session with Gemini. Perhaps it's too radical?
Can't indicate your preferred languages either.
Perhaps a "simple web mode" would be the better solution... a proxy that strips away the unwanted parts.
> Seems to be hard to create a website where you can login or maintain a session with Gemini
I don't think that's supported. Gemini is more about providing an ultra-lightweight alternative to 'Web 1.0'. It's more at the level of the man page format, [0] or markdown, than HTML.
I imagine they might want a way to provide access-control, but I doubt they'd be interested in implementing read/write features.
> Can't indicate your preferred languages either.
Looking at the spec, I think you can. [1]
> Perhaps a "simple web mode" would be the better solution... a proxy that strips away the unwanted parts.
Don't we have that with Reader Mode and Outline.com?
I didn't submit any talks this year but I assume it's like other events where people record them at home and then upload them somewhere. ADDED: A lot of people use OBS.
Or use a browser extension that blocks referers, like uMatrix. (It's a good habit for privacy in general, and doesn't break any website I know but JIRA)
Interesting. "I'll talk about a thing I don't like to people I don't like". Doesn't even work on the sarcasm/satire level because there's too much effort put into it. What am I missing?
Maybe the problem is with my sense of humor, but I find that when a comedian starts the sketch with "you're a stupid moron, let me tell you why..." I have trouble following the rest.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? I'm not judging you (seriously); it's just not the kind of conversation we're looking for here, and it destroys the kind we are looking for, so having both is not an option. Sort of the same way you can't have both fires and, say, museums—or tank battles and, say, parks.
It's not about the people going to these events, it's who those people end up infecting.
A student goes to FOSDEM , catches COVID-19 without any symptoms, and then on the way back home ends up interacting with a bunch of elderly family members, infecting them and possibly hospitalising them in the process. That's just one scenario, there are hundreds of other scenarios that will also occur.
Death robs you of your humanity far more effectively than any lockdown. Also now that we have several effective vaccines being rolled out all over the world, it makes even less sense to have this attitude. And all this in the name of some Linux talks and pommes frites? I think you need a little bit more perspective on the situation.
I live in Australia, so my life has been back to normal for several months now. I get the feeling you are afraid of something though, so maybe you're projecting those fears onto other people.
I've been able to leave my home this entire pandemic. What are you even talking about. And given how badly the rest of the planet is handling things, I wouldn't leave Australia even if I could (though we can visit New Zealand, which is pretty nice this time of year).
("If the vaccines don't work" is a pretty big if given we have a plethora of evidence that they are effective. You can't "what if" yourself into a reasonable argument.)
Current CFR is closer to 3% globally not 0.3% (I don't know how people get this number consistently wrong -- it's on the first page of any CoVID tracking website). A reminder that 3% of the world population is more than 150 million people (and the CFR goes up if hospitals are overrun -- which we saw several times last year).
Most people have some kind of underlying health condition (more than two-thirds of the western world are overweight or obese -- that's already one co-morbidity), so it's not surprising that most people who die from CoVID have other health conditions. And this is ignoring the more obvious problem that even otherwise perfectly healthy people can infect family and friends.
Case fatality (which is at 3%) is not the same as infection fatality. You cannot directly measure infection fatality until the pandemic is over (the best you have are estimates until then), so going with the case fatality rate (which has stayed around 3% for most of the pandemic) seems like a reasonable choice.
How will you measure infection fatality after the pandemic is over? You will still need to know the number of infected (including the asymptomatic) before you can arrive at a meaningful number. Or do you mean that infection fatality can be calculated once you assume that 100% of the population has been exposed to the virus? IFR would still be based on assumptions, I think.
> In-person events like FOSDEM invaluable to open source and worth the risk for those w/out underlying health conditions.
This would be fair enough if it were the case that only those choosing to attend the event are taking the risk. Most would-be attendees presumably live in societies where they interact with others, and presumably would need to interact with others travelling too and from the event.
It would make sense if closed cities were doing better than oepn cities but that isn't the case. Miami has fewer deaths than NYC and everything is open in Miami.
I think it's probably fair that when this is all presumably past, we'll conclude that some of the measures that we took and that many feel very strongly about weren't super-effective. (And a lot of it boils down to dumb luck.) On the other hand, there have been mitigating measures to some degree in most places so I can't seriously argue that we should have just have said "screw it. Let's just pretend that everything's normal." and act accordingly.
LA and Miami have similar # of deaths to covid while LA has way more restrictions. The difference? The difference? The restrictions can't stop the spread of a respiratory disease. They never could. We just copied China on the masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. That's it. Virus gonna virus whatever you do.
I currently live in a SE asian country w/ very few covid deaths and few restrictions. The most likely reason is prior immunity due to exposure to other coronaviruses.
Clearly untenable and irresponsible to hold an in-person event right now. I'm quite sure the school it's held at wouldn't have allowed it even if the organizers wanted to do it. You're not necessarily a horrible person. Just utterly disconnected from reality. Watch your Linux talks on video and get some takeout fries.
I think this is fine as long a those who decide to risk their life do not put others at risk without their consent, and there are equivalent remote or socially distanced alternatives for all activities.
For example, anyone who decides they want to risk infection should have to register with the government and they will be provided with an arm band that must be on display in public areas so other citizens can avoid them. Private premises will have the legal right to deny access to anyone with the arm band.
It might be a fun experiment in natural selection taking is course. All the "callous" types can go to FOSDEM and and see how bad of an infection of COVID-19 they -- or their relatives -- will get, and if they are part of the 0.3% (if that is accurate).
Except that we - literally all of us - have to live with this disease. The vaccines are somewhat effective but not entirely at best 70% but perhaps 40% and worse for those most vulnerable. There is only one way forward.
do you? during winter? when they are usually full anyways? Also, please tell me if hospitals in cities w/ full lockdowns are doing better than those that are open? You can't. The restrictions don't work. Florida isn't doing any worse than CA. Unpopular opinion.
In that entire page, it does not once tell me what FOSDEM is (at least on mobile). I can infer it's some sort of computing conference from the events, but that's about it.
