We are excited to announce that the call for proposals is now open for the Distribution Devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM 2021, to be hosted virtually on 6 February 2021.

As more and more workloads are being considered for containerization in the future and are finally landing in virtualized environments today, distributions remain a critical success factor and are more important than ever. Containers, like virtual machines, are not magical and rely on piles of software being assembled in a way that is repeatable, reliable, and functional. This is at the very heart of the problem that distributions have always solved.

Each distribution is responsible for building, testing, and releasing software as well as managing the lifecycle of each application in the collection. Additionally, distributions do very important work in ensuring that various versions of upstream software work well together and can co-exist. Distributions are also, often responsible, for “de-vendoring” upstream software so that security fixes can be applied more quickly.

We welcome submissions targeted at contributors interested in issues unique to distributions, especially in the following topics:

Topics and Areas of Focus

Focus Areas

  • The ways that distribution technologies can be leveraged to allow for easier creation of a multi-verse of artifacts from single source trees. This includes the increasing move toward self-contained applications and providing multiple non-parallel installed versions of software.
  • Efforts being made in shared environments around Build/Test/Release cycles.
  • Topics related to the delivery problem as it impacts updates in terms of both size and rollback/reliability are expected to be featured.

Additional Topic Ideas

  • Distribution and Community collaborations, eg: how does code flow from developers to end users across communities, ensuring trust and code audibility
  • Automating building software for redistribution to minimize human involvement, eg: bots that branch and build software, bots that participate as team members extending human involvement
  • Cross-distribution collaboration on common issues, eg: content distribution, infrastructure, and documentation
  • Growing distribution communities, eg: onboarding new users, helping new contributors learn community values and technology, increasing contributor technical skills, recognizing and rewarding contribution
  • Principles of Rolling Releases, Long Term Supported Releases (LTS), feature-gated releases, and calendar releases
  • Distribution construction, installation, deployment, packaging and ontent management
  • Balancing new code and active upstreams verus security updates, back porting and minimization of user breaking changes
  • Delivering architecture independent software universally across architectures within the confines of distribution systems
  • Effectively communicating the difference in experience across architectures for developers, packagers, and users
  • Working with vendors and including them in the community
  • The future of distributions, emerging trends and evolving user demands from the idea of a platform

Ideal submissions are actionable and opinionated. Submissions may be in the form of 25 or 50 minute talks, panel sessions, round-table discussions, or Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

Due to the virtual format of FOSDEM 2021, the preferred length for talk submissions is 25 minutes.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 20-Dec-2020 @ 2359 UTC
Acceptance notifications: 25-Dec-2020 @ 2359 UTC
Final schedule announcement: 31st of December @ 2359 UTC

How to submit

Visit https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21

  1. If you do not have an account, create one
  2. Click ‘Create Event’
  3. Enter your presentation details
  4. Be sure to select the Distributions Devroom track!
  5. Submit

What to include

  • The title of your submission
  • A 1-paragraph Abstract
  • A longer description including the benefit of your talk to your target audience, including a definition of your target audience.
  • Approximate length / type of submission (talk, BoF, …)
  • Links to related websites/blogs/talk material (if any)

Administrative Notes

All presentations will need to be pre-recorded and put into our system at least a couple of weeks before the event.

Once your talk was accepted, we will assign you a volunteer to help you to produce the pre-recorded content. The volunteer will review the content and ensure its quality. They will also be responsible to ensure that the content is into the system and ready to broadcast.

Durin the stream of your talk, you must be available online for the Q/A session

The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the devroom organizers: distributions-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/distributions-devroom)