FOSDEM

21 posts tagged with "FOSDEM" (See all categories)

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FOSDEM 2025 Wrap Up

2025-02-13 — Events, FOSDEMThib

The Matrix.org Foundation and its growing community were once again present at the biggest OSS conference in Europe, and it's been a tremendous success! It was an opportunity for us to gather, share ideas and debate about ongoing topics, meet the broader FOSS community and present our work.

🔗Fringe Event

With 8000 visitors, FOSDEM is primarily a place to share your work with others and present the latest developments to those interested. But it's not necessarily the best venue for conversations within the community about topics that are still in-flight.

Because so many people are doing the trip to gather in a single city, it remains a good opportunity to gather your own community in a more intimate setting. This is precisely what Fringe Events happening before or after FOSDEM are about.

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Matrix in full force at FOSDEM

2024-11-19 — Events, FOSDEMThib

The Matrix.org Foundation and community are very happy to announce that this year, they will be in full force at FOSDEM, with a community event right before the conference, a booth to welcome everyone during the conference, and a dev room to explore topics in depth!

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Call for Participation to the FOSDEM 2025 Matrix Devroom

2024-11-05 — Events, FOSDEMThib

Hello everyone,

The Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person next year again at FOSDEM! Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

Continue reading…

FOSDEM 2024 Wrap Up

2024-02-08 — Events, FOSDEMThib

This year again the Matrix.org Foundation was at FOSDEM, and what a huge energy boost it has been for us! Between a Fringe Event for the Matrix community to gather, a booth where the vast majority of people came by to show their support for our work, a devroom with four hours of awesome Matrix content, and last but not least a main track talk where Matthew covered what we had been doing for the past year… It has been a very intense weekend!

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Meet us at FOSDEM

2024-01-11 — Events, FOSDEMThib

This year again the Matrix Foundation and Community will have plenty of opportunities to meet at FOSDEM! Together with our awesome community, we’re organising a FOSDEM Fringe Event before FOSDEM itself, we will have a booth to meet everyone and spread the word about Matrix, and a devroom to go more in depth on Matrix topics.

Continue reading…

Call for Participation to the FOSDEM 2024 Matrix Devroom

2023-11-10 — Events, FOSDEMThib

Building on last year's success, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person this year again at FOSDEM. Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

Continue reading…

FOSDEM 2023: Matrix’s first physical devroom

2023-02-09 — Events, FOSDEMThib
Last update: 2023-02-09 17:02

For the past two years, FOSDEM couldn’t happen in-person. Fortunately we could help, and Matrix hosted the world's largest free & open source software conference online! This year we were finally back in-person… but not only.

The set-up we have arranged in 2021 and polished in 2022 has proved to be robust and served us well during the pandemic. Returning to an in-person conference didn’t mean we had to throw it all away… quite the opposite!

Continue reading…

Call for Participation for the FOSDEM 2023 Matrix Devroom

2022-11-16 — Events, FOSDEMThib

This year, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host the first ever Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person at FOSDEM. Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

This call for participation is only about the physical devroom. A separate CfP will be issued for the online devroom once there are more details about it.

Key dates are:

  • Conference dates 4-5 February, 2023 In person
  • Matrix Devroom date: Sunday 5 morning in person, online devroom to be announced
  • Submission deadline: Monday 5th December
  • Announcement of selected talks: Thursday 15th December

You must be available in person to present your talk for the physical devroom.

Talk Details

The talks can follow one of thee two formats for the physical devroom

  • 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
  • 50 min talk + 10 min Q&A for more complex subjects which need more focus

We strongly encourage you to prepare a demo when it makes sense, so people can actually see what your work looks like in practice!

Of course, the proposal must respect the FOSDEM terms as well:

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software. By participating in the event you agree to the publication of your recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

Submitting a Proposal

Proposals must be submitted on FOSDEM's conference management system Pentabarf before December 5 December 8 2022. If you are not used to Pentabarf, you can follow this beginners guide to Pentabarf.

We expect to receive more requests than we have slots available. The devroom organisers will be reviewing the proposals and accepting them based on the potential positive impact the project has on Matrix (as defined in by the Mission section of https://matrix.org/foundation).

If a project proposal has been turned down, it doesn't mean we don't believe it has good potential. Maintainers are invited to join the #twim:matrix.org Matrix room to give it some visibility.

Hosting FOSDEM 2022 on Matrix

2022-02-07 — Events, FOSDEM, NewsThib

Last year was the first time FOSDEM was hosted on Matrix, and it was generally a huge success - and so the FOSDEM team trusted us again this year and we’re happy to say that it seems to have gone really well! This year’s FOSDEM was massive once again, featuring 654 speakers, 731 events, and 103 tracks.

This year hosting the event went smoother than last year, the only significant issue was some of the Q&A Jitsis not being broadcast to the devrooms on Saturday before 10:15 UTC, for which we offer our apologies to the speakers impacted. This turned out to be a problem with the Matrix<->Jitsi access control sync system which hadn’t showed up during earlier testing, but we patched around it rapidly on the day.

The most notable difference between this year and the previous year has been the usage of a “attendees.fosdem.org” instance in addition to the original “fosdem.org” one, specifically for attendees. The graphs speak for themselves: Synapse could handle the load of the 23K users (13K joined users and 10K lurkers) spread across a total number of 941 rooms. The real eye-opener however is that of the 13K joined users, only 4K came came from the FOSDEM attendee server, and 1K from Libera Chat, meaning that ~70% of the Matrix participants were already on Matrix and came in from existing servers! 🤯 That means the vast majority of people attended over federation. Decentralisation at work, people! It works! We didn’t host the conference… you did!!

FOSDEM attendees heatmap

But not only did the backend handle the load smoothly: the general user experience felt tightly integrated. People were welcomed by a tailor-made home page in Element to help them navigate through all the tracks and stands:.

Homescreen of chat.fosdem.org

One of the great things is it doesn’t require heavy modifications to Element: anyone who installs their own instance of Element can use a simple html file to display relevant information to their audience.

New this year, we also generated a space hierarchy for the whole conference at #fosdem2022:fosdem.org to help navigate the maze of rooms, making it even easier for users on their own servers to jump in:

FOSDEM Space listing all the FOSDEM rooms

Another greatly appreciated feature was the famous “maximised widgets” I (Thib) keep telling you about in Matrix Live episodes. Attendees and speakers could give the conference the central attention it deserved while simultaneously keeping an eye on what was happening in the chat.

FOSDEM stand with maximised widget view

From the speaker's perspective, we tried to streamline the user journey as much as possible: a bot invited them to a backstage room, in which they joined a Jitsi widget while their talk was being played in the track or devroom. They could see the most upvoted questions by the audience in a dedicated widget. A few minutes before their pre-recorded talk was over, a countdown (new this year!) could be displayed to tell them and the host they were about to go live. At the end of the countdown, the backstage Jitsi was broadcasted to the track so the speaker could answer the questions.

Backstage room where the speaker and host could talk and see the questions

If you want to have an in-depth look at the backend’s architecture, it didn’t change much from last year. You can have a look at last year’s blog post for the details on the setup. Most of the heavy lifting was around the conference bot used to set rooms up, create the spaces, populate them with widgets, arrange layouts and trigger countdowns before going live…

Finally we are immensely proud that we had our first ever Matrix Devroom! Not only does it mean the staff of a large international open source conference thinks it’s worth having a track of our own, it also means our community has grown to the point where we could have 8 hours of back to back Matrix content! Here’s a link to the YouTube playlists to which we are going to add the videos of FOSDEM as they’re being published.

Huge thanks to the FOSDEM team for trusting us, massive shout-out to Element Matrix Services and Element’s Ops and infrastructure team for their fantastic job in setting everything up and making sure everything was ready in time, a sincere thank you to all the fantastic speakers who shared awesome content, and finally to all the attendees. What a weekend!