Join Red Hat in Brussels: FOSDEM and more

Red Hat has been a long-time supporter of the FOSDEM conference, the annual European gathering of folks in the open source community. Through its main track program and satellite tracks in community-organized DevRooms, the conference offers something for everyone: software developers, policy wonks, legal experts, community managers and academic researchers.

Along with our colleagues from Red Hat engineering, the Open Source Program Office is delighted to return to this event in person in Brussels on February 4-5, 2023 at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. There is no cost to attend, and registration is not required.

FOSDEM has a long tradition of bringing other events to Brussels in its same time frame. Affectionately known as “FOSDEM Fringe” events, there are several of these in the lead up to the conference where Red Hatters will be organizing or speaking. We’ve prepared this handy guide to where we’ll be at FOSDEM, and we hope you'll come find us during our time in Brussels.

Not heading to FOSDEM? The talks at FOSDEM are all livestreamed, and the talks are recorded and published on the conference site shortly after the event concludes. Some Fringe events will also be livestreamed, and we’ve included that information here. 

Pre-FOSDEM events

The Friday before FOSDEM begins is absolutely packed with Fringe events, including full-day talks and workshops on open source project research, open source and public policy, and the CentOS ecosystem. Please join us—each event here is free of charge, but you will have to register to attend. Many of these events reach capacity quickly the week prior to FOSDEM.

All of these events take place on Friday, February 3rd.

CentOS Connect

At the DoubleTree Brussels City Center

CentOS Connect is one-day mini-conference dedicated to the CentOS project’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs), CentOS Stream and the entire Enterprise Linux ecosystem. The event features updates from SIG leaders, including automotive and hyperscaling, as well as talks on running cloud-native applications on CentOS, network management in enterprise Linux, and more. 

On-site registration - Livestream registration

CHAOSSCon

At the Bedford Hotel & Congress Center

CHAOSSCon brings together academics, industry researchers and data scientists of all stripes who study the health and sustainability of open source software projects. The day will begin with talks from senior project members and interactive discussion sessions with the attendees on the role CHAOSS can play in supporting Open Source Program Offices and where the community should focus in the future.

Folks attending may also be interested in the lunch session on measuring open source software in universities, hosted by the OSPO++ community. The day will conclude with workshops to get folks familiar with the CHAOSS project’s two primary toolsets, Augur and GrimoireLab. Members of Red Hat’s OSPO will lead a discussion on Project Aspen, a Red Hat project for data visualizations based on Augur.

CHAOSSCon registration - OSS in Universities Lunch registration

The EU Open Source Policy Summit 2023

At the Sparks Meeting Center

The annual policy summit from OpenForum Europe examines the top issues of the day at the intersection of public policy, open source and standards, and the opportunities for Europe to leverage the value of open source collaboration in the public sector and industry. Red Hat’s Hans Roth, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat EMEA, will give an opening keynote address, our EMEA Policy Analyst, James Lovegrove, will host a panel on avoiding unintended consequences for open source software projects when enacting legislation, and Harald Ruckriegel, Global Automotive Industry Lead at Red Hat, will speak with his fellow panelists on the topic of open source and the manufacturing industry.

While in-person registration for the event has reached capacity, attendees are encouraged to sign up for the event livestream or the waiting list. Our friends at OpenForum Europe have ensured that the livestream experience will be top-notch for virtual attendees. 

EU Open Source Policy Summit registration

FOSDEM DevRooms

Several Red Hat folks organize full-day sessions that run in parallel to the main conference track. Known as DevRooms, these mini-conferences bring together seasoned practitioners and newcomers alike to explore special interest topics and to foster collaboration amongst different communities. This year, we’re co-organizers for six DevRooms:

• Community - best practices for the human elements of software development practice 
• Distributions - open source operating systems, package management, and debugging
• Security - supply chain security, cryptography, software quality tools and best practices
• Software Defined Storage - management and monitoring tools, scaling SDS, use case deep dives
• Sovereign Cloud - issues of user privacy and sovereignty at the intersection of the needs of infrastructure providers in the cloud computing era
• Virtualization and IaaS - virtualized networking, cloud security, hyperconverged deployments

Stands

For those who find the best discussions in the hallway track, we’re right there with you. We’ll be discussing Red Hat’s contributions to the open source world and highlighting key upstream projects at the exhibit stands on Saturday and Sunday. Here’s where to find us:

• Ansible - Building K, Level 1
• CentOS & RDO - Building H, Level 1
• Fedora - Building H, Level 1
• Foreman - Building K, Level 1

Talks

Red Hatters will present more than 25 sessions at FOSDEM in the Main Track and DevRooms. If you’d like to keep up to date on our activities while at the conference, including information to tune in to the conference livestreams, follow @redhatopen on Twitter!

We’re looking forward to discussing the state of the art and sharing swag with our fellow open source enthusiasts!