Tracks
We welcome proposals from speakers and people who are excited to give their first talk. We want seasoned professionals and volunteers, as well as fresh perspectives from new entrants. Everyone has something of value to share!
Camp KDE
Camp KDE is the KDE conference for North America. Like the flagship Akademy event, it is a gathering of members of the KDE community to discuss and collaborate on the future of the community and the technology it produces.
Databases
Database are everywhere from embedded devices to large data centers! This track is designed for a general audience of developers, sysadmins, DBAs and open source users to cover experiences, tools and technical details of how you use databases.
Fedicon
Talks and demos about decentralized social networks, the social web, apps, and protocol features.
FOSS and Research Computing
Talks and projects about using open software and open data for research
FOSS in Daily Life
How are you using FOSS in your "everyday" life? Are there places where you find it's easier or harder to get the people around you to respect and appreciate software freedom? What areas of software are we missing in our pursuit of software freedom for all? Talks in this track can be very personal, and it's a great place to share about the particular free programs you use and why, any hacks you've found or deployed to make things work better for you, and what you feel like you are still missing -- sharing may inspire others, and we hope there can be dialog in this track so people may leave with new free solutions for their daily routines.
Licensing / Legal
This is the track for proposals related to best practices around licensing and management of licensing information, discussions of recent licensing controversies and news, developments in relevant laws around the world, run-downs of important patent litigation, and the like. We'd especially welcome talks from participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics -- to discuss the day-to-day details of using copyleft licensing, obstacles facing copyleft and the future of copyleft as a strategy to advance and defend software freedom for users and developers around the world.
Linux Kernel
We've been working on this computer program for 35 years and it's still not finished. Join us to find out about some of the latest developments in this small hobby project.
Open Source Governance and Community Sustainability
Open source software doesn't run on code alone — it runs on communities. Yet the governance structures that hold those communities together are often undocumented, contested, or simply exhausted. This track brings together maintainers, contributors, community managers, and researchers to have honest, practical conversations about how projects are governed, who holds power in open source, and what it actually takes to keep communities healthy and sustainable over the long term.
We will run an open call for talk submissions, welcoming proposals from maintainers, researchers, community managers, and contributors at all experience levels. Alongside the open call, we will also proactively reach out to practitioners and researchers whose work is directly relevant — particularly contributors from historically underrepresented groups in FOSS, experienced maintainers from well-known projects, and academics studying open source ecosystems who rarely get the chance to speak directly with practitioners.
Sessions will combine practitioner experience with research, connecting lessons learned in the trenches with findings from studies across thousands of real repositories. We'll tackle the things people often talk about: maintainer burnout, unclear decision-making, contributor drop-off, corporate influence, conflict resolution, and the invisible labor that holds projects together. We'll also have a dedicated space for students and newcomers to demystify how open source communities actually work and how contributors grow into leadership.
Right to Repair
Right to repair and the war on general purpose computing
Science of Community
What can research tell us about building and sustaining free/open source software? This track welcomes submissions on topics at intersections of research and FOSS communities, including (but not limited to):
- Community dynamics: culture, diversity, boundaries, and norms
- Emerging strategies for collective action and structural response to challenges to the sustainability of free software
- Metrics related to life cycles, value, participation, quality, security, sustainability, and risks
- Supply chain ecosystems and dependencies
- Project and ecosystem governance (i.e., leadership, regulation, management, oversight)
- Evidence-based engineering
- Production models: markets, communities, foundations, and beyond
Student Talks
Are you a student working with open software for your research? Or maybe you have done work on an open project as part of a class or hobby. Present on your work alongside other students, independently or in a group.
XMPP
XMPP is an extensible, foundational, and libre building block for any sort of federated communication infrastructure. Talks ranging from those new to the idea, setting up chat or social servers for small groups and families and other use cases, to those familiar with the issues such as SPAM and abuse prevention in a federated space, to technical deep dive talks about open source projects in the space and their innovations, would all be something worth covering in this track. We would strive to both appeal to the core XMPP audience and bring them to FOSSY, but also to introduce the projects and ideas to the rest of the FOSS community.
Wild card
This track is for any talks that don't fit cleanly into the rest of the tracks. Don't be shy about putting your talk here if you don't know where it should go, we can always assign it to a specific track later. We know there are many important free software projects out there that could be highlighted in a talk that aren't hosted at SFC and don't fit any of the other tracks -- this is the right place for those.