Update: Call For Proposals—FOSDEM 2016 Virtualization & IaaS DevRoom

I am excited to announce that the call for proposals is now open for the Virtualization & IaaS devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM 2016.

Note: This blog entry has been updated to include new information on the deadline for submittal, as well as more information on the speakers mentoring program and the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

This year will mark FOSDEM’s 16th anniversary as one of the longest-running free and open source software developer events, attracting more than 5,000 developers and users from all over the world. It will be held once again in Brussels, Belgium, on January 30 & 31, 2016.

This devroom is a collaborative effort, and is organized by dedicated folks from projects such as OpenStack, Xen, Mesos, oVirt, and Foreman. We would like to invite all those who are involved in these fields to submit your proposals by December 8th, 2015.

About the Devroom

The Virtualization & IaaS devroom will feature session topics such as open source hypervisors and virtual machine managers such as KVM, Xen, bhyve, and VirtualBox, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service projects such as Apache CloudStack, OpenStack, oVirt, OpenNebula, and Ganeti.

This devroom will host presentations and labs that focus on topics of shared interest, such as KVM, libvirt, shared storage, virtualized networking, clustering and high availability, interfacing with multiple hypervisors, and scaling across hundreds or thousands of servers.

Presentations in this devroom will be aimed at developers working on these platforms who are looking to collaborate and improve shared infrastructure or solve common problems. We seek topics that encourage dialog between projects and continued work post-FOSDEM.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 8 December 2015
Acceptance notifications: 11 December 2015
Final schedule announcement: 17 December 2015
Devroom: 30-31 January 2016 (two days)

Submission Guidelines

• We expect more proposals than we can possibly accept, so it is vitally important that you submit your proposal on or before the deadline. Late submissions are unlikely to be considered.

• All presentation slots are 45 minutes, with 35 minutes planned for presentations, and 10 minutes for Q&A.

• All presentations will be recorded and made available under Creative Commons licenses. In the Submission notes field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-By-SA-4.0 or CC-By-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example:

"If my presentation is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, \<NAME>."

• In the Submission notes field, please also confirm that if your talk is accepted, you will be able to attend FOSDEM and deliver your presentation. We will not consider proposals from prospective speakers who are unsure whether they will be able to secure funds for travel and lodging to attend FOSDEM. (Sadly, we are not able to offer travel funding for prospective speakers.)

Submit Your Proposal

All submissions must be made via the Pentabarf event planning site. If you have not used Pentabarf before, you will need to create an account. If you submitted proposals for FOSDEM in previous years, you can use your existing account.

After creating the account, select Create Event to start the submission process. Make sure to select Virtualization & IaaS devroom from the Track list. Please fill out all the required fields, and provide a meaningful abstract and description of your proposed session.

Speaker Mentoring Program

Update: As a part of the rising efforts to grow our communities and encourage a diverse and inclusive conference ecosystem, we're happy to announce that we'll be offering mentoring for newcomer speakers. Our mentors can help you with tasks such as reviewing your abstract, reviewing your presentation outline or slides, or practicing your talk with you.

You may apply to the mentoring program as a newcomer speaker if you:

• Never presented before or
• Presented only lightning talks or
• Presented full-length talks at small meetups (<50 ppl)

Submission Guidelines:

• Mentored presentations will have 25-minute slots, where 20 minutes will include the presentation and 5 minutes will be reserved for questions.

• The number of newcomer session slots is limited, so we will probably not be able to accept all applications.

• You must submit your talk and abstract to apply for the mentoring program, our mentors are volunteering their time and will happily provide feedback but won't write your presentation for you!

If you are experiencing problems with Pentabarf, the proposal submission interface, or have other questions, you can email our devroom mailing list and we will try to help you.

How to Apply:

In addition to agreeing to video recording and confirming that you can attend FOSDEM in case your session is accepted, please write "speaker mentoring program application" in the "Submission notes" field, and list any prior speaking experience or other relevant information for your application.

Call for Mentors

Interested in mentoring newcomer speakers? We'd love to have your help! Please email iaas-virt-devroom at lists.fosdem.org with a short speaker bio and any specific fields of expertise (for example, KVM, OpenStack, storage, etc) so that we can match you with a newcomer speaker from a similar field. Estimated time investment can be as low as a 5-10 hours in total, usually distributed weekly or bi-weekly.

Never mentored a newcomer speaker but interested to try? Our mentoring program coordinator will be happy to answer your questions and give you tips on how to optimize the mentoring process. Email us and we'll be happy to answer your questions!

Code of Conduct

Update: Following the release of the updated code of conduct for FOSDEM, we'd like to remind all speakers and attendees that all of the presentations and discussions in our devroom are held under the guidelines set in the CoC and we expect attendees, speakers, and volunteers to follow the CoC at all times.

If you submit a proposal and it is accepted, you will be required to confirm that you accept the FOSDEM CoC. If you have any questions about the CoC or wish to have one of the devroom organizers review your presentation slides or any other content for CoC compliance, please email us and we will do our best to assist you.

Call for Volunteers

We are also looking for volunteers to help run the devroom. We need assistance watching time for the speakers, and helping with video for the devroom. Please contact Mikey Ariel for more information.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this devroom, please send your questions to our devroom mailing list. You can also subscribe to the list to receive updates about important dates, session announcements, and to connect with other attendees.

See you all at FOSDEM!