FOSDEM has achieved that year after year, growing steadily since it was first founded by Raphael Bauduin in 2000.
What is FOSDEM?
Held at the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels, Belgium it's the largest gathering of open source developers and enthusiasts in Europe, and definitely not to be missed!
FOSDEM was the last event I attended pre-pandemic back in 2019 - a very cold, snowy weekend as I remember it, and incredibly overwhelming being around so many people!
The following two years were held online - an incredible feat of organisation on the part of the team - while we sat out the pandemic, with in-person events returning in 2023.
First time speaking at FOSDEM!
This year, I was absolutely delighted to hear that my talk proposal for the Community Devroom had been accepted - and even more exciting, I was first up in what was a jam-packed room with queues out of the door!
It was the first time I'd delivered the talk about how we went through the process of changing Mautic's governance model from being corporate-owned to an independent open source project, which was well received. There were some great questions from the audience on how we dealt with the legal requirements and decided the salaries on the project, what was the emotional impact of going through the whole process, and how we encouraged people to vote in the voting processes.
There were also many hallway track conversations over the coming days - and even for weeks afterwards at other events when people stopped me to chat about it.
I'd like to say a huge thank you to the A/V heroes who made sure that everything ran smoothly with the mics and video stream, and the wonderful Devroom organisers, Shirley Bailes, Laura Czajkowski and Leslie Hawthorn, along with the in-room volunteers who did an amazing job of organising the room and making sure we all ran to time!
Check out the slides, links and video recording: How do you change the governance model of an established open source project? - in true FOSDEM style the videos were all processed using open source tooling and crowdsourced to us, the speakers, to provide the appropriate timestamps for starting and stopping the sessions, meaning they were published even before the end of the conference!
Watch the talk and the Q&A here:
Thankfully the talk was early on the first day of the event, which meant that the rest of the event could be dedicated to running the stand which we were provided with this year.
Promoting Mautic
Each year FOSDEM offers the chance for Open Source projects and organisations to apply to have a presence at FOSDEM, which is an incredible opportunity. Nowhere else do you have the chance to chat with so many open source enthusiasts in one place - so we were ecstatic to hear that our stand proposal had been accepted this year! 🥳
Running a stand at any event can be really intense - there's very little chance to have a break at FOSDEM because your stand is directly outside session rooms, so there's always a steady flow of people. This year, I put out a call for volunteers and the lovely Carsten Aevermann and Lenon Leite answered the call!
Together we spent the entire weekend talking non-stop with people about Mautic - we met many who had never heard about Mautic, some who were past users of Mautic but hadn't heard about our latest updates, and several who were passionate users of Mautic!
Thanks to the work carried out at the Community Sprint the week prior to FOSDEM, we had a great landing page and campaign for people to sign up and learn more about Mautic which was well received. We also had a huge amount of interest in our fliers - which we had to get reprinted due to running out on the first day!
It was a real reminder to me that while we might think people know about open source alternatives to the common proprietary software tools out there in the marketing stack, actually even informed open source developers had never even thought to look, let alone knowing about Mautic. Definitely work to be done here!
I also got to meet up with two awesome members of the Rands Leadership Slack while we were at FOSDEM which was awesome - thanks for the stroopwaffel!
Women of Open Source meetup
A side project that launched last year, the Women of Open Source community was founded by myself and Lorna Mitchell as a private community for any women who were interested in or working in open source.
We came up with the idea on the way back from FOSDEM last year, and this year we had an informal meetup for people to come and chat. Admittedly it was a little last minute and next year, we plan to formalise plans much earlier and get it on the formal schedule as a BOF session, but it was great to meet with a few other folk and chat about our journeys in open source.
Summary
FOSDEM is definitely a must-attend for anyone who is involved with open source, or even remotely interested in technology. There are so many diverse devrooms, interesting topics and great open source projects there, not to mention all the stickers to collect, that it's a great way to connect in with the wider ecosystem and learn more.
It'll definitely be a firm fixture on my calendar for coming years!
