Call for Participation - FOSDEM 2027 Decentralised Messaging Devroom

The Matrix.org Foundation, together with our friends from the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) and Delta Chat communities, is organising a Decentralised Messaging devroom at FOSDEM 2027, and we are looking for speakers!

Focused on federated and self-hostable chat, this devroom brings our ecosystems together to tackle shared challenges. Although our architectures look pretty different under the hood, we face many of the same hurdles. We want to get together to share operational and implementation experiences, discuss shared technical challenges, and look at practical ways our networks can cooperate.

Each of our communities have plenty of material to share, and we are also reaching beyond them to invite contributors working on chat across other federated and decentralised ecosystems (such as AT Protocol and ActivityPub), as well as developers building reusable components like moderation tools.

Talks that others can learn from are preferred; marketing talks will be rejected.

FOSDEM is an annual conference about free and open source software. It takes place at the ULB (Campus Solbosch), Brussels, Belgium on 30 & 31 January 2027.

• The devroom will be held on Sunday, January 31 2027
• Speakers must present in person at FOSDEM in Brussels.
• Submission deadline is Friday, November 20, 2026 at 23:55 UTC
• Speakers notified: November 27, 2026
• Schedule published: December 7, 2026

Please distribute this CFP as widely as possible to interested parties!

🔗Topics

We welcome technical presentations, demos, and experience reports on topics including:

• Practical bridging and gateways between decentralised messaging protocols.
• Tackling spam, abuse, and moderation across federated topologies without centralised gatekeeping.
• End-to-end encryption challenges and implementations, including group E2EE (such as MLS).
• Decentralised key transparency and identity discovery.
• Usable security, UX, and improving the onboarding experience for novice users on federated systems.
• Building messaging tools and chat extensions on other federated stacks (e.g. AT Protocol, ActivityPub).
• Standalone and reusable building blocks (e.g. shared moderation tooling, trust & safety frameworks).
• Server operations, scaling federation, and sync optimisation for low-power mobile clients.
• Lightning talks highlighting new experiments or niche tools.

🔗Submission

We ask for a short talk abstract, a proposed duration, and a brief speaker biography. Links to your code repositories, project websites, or prior talks are also appreciated.

Submissions must be made through Pretalx no later than Friday, November 20, 2026.

The suggested duration for a regular talk is 25 minutes (20 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q&A). If the best format for your project or idea is a 5-to-10-minute lightning talk, we will happily accommodate lightning sessions as well. Talks are streamed and published under CC-BY, and the FOSDEM Code of Conduct applies.

Depending on the volume and variety of submissions, we may contact you to adapt your talk length to fit the final room schedule.

A programme committee with at least one reviewer from each organising community reviews all submissions jointly. Talks will be selected based on technical interest, relevance, and overall project diversity across the schedule.

🔗Volunteering

If you would like to help to keep things running smoothly on the day, we’d be grateful for a few extra hands! Please get in touch via decentralised-messaging-devroom-manager at fosdem.org

On behalf of the Events Working Group (represented by Andy) along with devroom co-managers Daniel, Guus, Holger, Matthew, and Saúl.