FOSDEM 30 & 31 January 2016 – Brussels, Belgium – Call for Speakers

Call for Speakers
Fosdem, Brussels, 30&31 January 2016
https://fosdem.org/2016/

Where?

Free University Brussels, Campus Solbosh:  https://fosdem.org/2016/practical/transportation/

Proposal
Please send in your presentation proposal.  What do we want from you?

• Your name
• Email address
• A short bio (couple of lines about who you are, what you do, what special things you have done in the past that make you proud)
• A recent picture of you
• Title of your presentation (shorter is better)
• Short description of your presentation (couple of paragraphs)

Send your proposal to:
Wendy van Dijk (email: wendy at wendy.org).
and
Claudio Ramirez (email: claudio at apt-get.be)

What is FOSDEM, and why a call for speakers?
Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial European event organized by and for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet (see http://fosdem.org/2016/).  Some 6,000 to 7,000 people will visit FOSDEM.  There will be 25 tracks in 5 different buildings, so a lot to choose from (the 2015 schedule is a good example: https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/ ).

There are three buildings with an expo, and in 2015 there were 55 booths, ranging from programming languages, operating systems, databases, magazines, browsers, publishers and much more (have a look at https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/stands/ ).

There are some food-carts (even one or more with vegan food) and a small restaurant.  There are a lot of restaurants in the neighbourhood, outside the campus area.

Friday night (29 January) will be “Beer Event” in Delirium Café.  The best opportunity to taste the best beers of the world, and they have 25 draught beers and a menu with thousands (!) different bottled beers.  We always try to have a nice table on the 1st floor (the ground floor is really to busy) for the Perl-community, so come and have a chat and a beer.  More info: https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/beerevent/

The Perl-presence at FOSDEM
This will be the seventh year that the Perl-community has a presence at FOSDEM and we expect to have both a booth and a devroom. We collected an impressive positive return and wish to renew the experience.

Both the booth- and the devroom-requests are sent to the organisers of FOSDEM, and we hope both will be approved.  Approval of the devroom should be announced on 19 october.  Approval of the booth should be announced 30 november.

The booth will be open both days.

We expect that the devroom event will take place one day only, last years we had it on Saturday.  if that happens again, the devroom will be on 30 January 2016.  Doors open at 10:30, close at 19:00, no (lunch or coffee or tea) breaks between the talks.  Since approval is pending, the room number is to be announced (so we don’t know the seating capacity of the room yet, in 2015 our room could hold 90 people).  There will be WIFI and a VGA projector.
Edit:  we just got confirmation, our room will be on Sunday, January 31.

This environment, being a university classroom, lends itself perfectly for talks. This is a wonderful opportunity to present your Perl-project, ­big or small­, or talk about subjects you care about. We are looking for a variety of subjects on all levels: starter and advanced, generic and specialized, core internals and CPAN, Perl 5 and Perl 6.

Since the audience is not necessary Perl-only but a wide variety of people interested in open source in general, maybe with little knowlegde of Perl, we do like “big talks”.  A technical talk about the peculiarities of a module that is not widely used might be better presented at your local Perl Mongers meeting or a Perl Workshop.  But still, we have accepted such talks in the past.  Take a look at schedules of past Perl-devrooms for examples of previously accepted talks ( https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/perl/ , https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/perl/ , https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/perl/ ).

We have 8,5 hours time, so we have the flexibility of using different time formats: e.g. talks of 20 minutes, more classic talks of 40 minutes.  In some occasions, we have had talks of 60 minutes, but we prefer talks of 20 or 40 minutes.

Please don’t doubt to send a proposal (information about yourself, subject, short description and time needed). If you have several subjects you are enthusiastic to talk about please send alternative proposals. Also mention your time constraints (if any, like “I really do not want to be the first/last speaker”, or “I do not want to speak in the morning/afternoon”).

Please send your talk proposal by email to the email-address mentioned above, and please don’t wait too long. You will receive a confirmation within 2 days that we receive your proposal.  On 18 december (preferrably earlier), we have to submit a definitive schedule in the system that the FOSDEM-organisers provide us with.  We will tell you wether your proposal is accepted as soon as we made the decision.

Please forward / distribute this call as wide as possible (certainly to your local mongers).

Thank you. Hope to meet you all in Brussels.

Added text (25-10-2015)(between *** and ***):
*** Please be aware that presenting at FOSDEM implies giving permission to be recorded. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).  If you need an exception, please mention this in your proposal (we need to contact the FOSDEM organisers before we include the speaker in our room’s schedule). FOSDEM accepts that there may be occasional situations where, after a streamed presentation, we expect there to be some short Q&A or informal discussion that we maybe do not want broadcasting – if so, let we need to know about this in advance so we can prepare properly for this and make sure the stream is cut at the right time. ***

Dinner
In previous years, we organised dinner on both the Saturday and the Sunday of FOSDEM.  We will try to reserve the upper floor of Belgian-style restaurant La Porteuse d’Eau again, since many of us love the restaurant.  That floor can host 70 people, and the menu will not be a-la-carte, but a limited amount of items.  Vegans and vegetarians will get good food too.  Food for people with special dietary needs (for instance, allergies), if mentioned in advance, can be taken care of.  But reservations have to made yet.
Brussels has an enormous amount of restaurants and bars.  If you cannot join us, you will be able to find a good place to eat somewhere.

Promotional materials
If your project, your company or your organisation has marketing materials, you are welcome to send them to me (please contact us before sending anything).  We hope to have two big tables again, and most space on the tables will be filled with books, camels, stickers, buttons, pens, tuits and some brochures, but we will have space for some other marketing materials.  It will be nice if some Perl-icon (e.g. butterfly, camel, onion, your company logo) is visible.  The booth’s organising team decides what is acceptable and what is not.

Notes
NB1: FOSDEM is a community-event without sponsoring for speakers in devrooms. In principle, we don’t have the means to pay for your trip and time. If you want to sponsor part of the event, please feel free to contact us.  If you can only come when sponsored, please mention that in your proposal, and we will see if sponsoring can be found.

NB2: We’ll also appreciate volunteers, for both the booth and the devroom. Please tell us which of the two days you are available (or both days if you can), and what times, and the type of volunteer-work you prefer, so we can also prepare a planning for this.

In the devroom we need volunteers like these: timekeepers, door-managers (in case the room is full, we have to stop more people from getting in), videocamera-operators (the event is streamed live, and each talk will be recorded).

For the booth we need volunteers like these: people that help carry boxes from our truck to the booth, and we have carts for that, and at the end, to carry all stuff back to the truck; people that help answer questions about Perl (5/6/CPAN/etc); people that help clean up during and after the expo.