Let's meet at FOSDEM 2025

We are looking forward to go to FOSDEM 2025 and we hope to run into you there. FOSDEM is the world’s largest gathering of free and open source software enthusiasts and open to everyone and free of charge. You don't even need to register. It takes place in at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels in the weekend of February 1-2, 2025.

Hex sticker booth!

We'll have our own stand in Building K level 2, where you'll be able to find us throughout the event. We'll bring a large batch of hexagon stickers — and might even do a hexdrop — so come by to pick up a few and have a chat. We love to hear your questions, remarks, ideas and plans.

Devroom: Funding the FOSS Ecosystem

Together with a.o. some of our peer funders and partners, we also have a new element we bring to FOSDEM which is the devroom on Funding the FOSS Ecosystem (and yes, funding is not static but develops and evolves continuously). The devroom brings together developers, maintainers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, donors and funders to explore various models and mechanisms that ensure the longevity and security of FOSS projects. It will run all Sunday with lots of interesting talks so drop by to have a conversation about FOSS funding.

BoF rooms

We're organizing two BoF (Birds of a Feather) meetings at FOSDEM. On Saturday there is the NGI Zero network meetup BOF. We're is inviting (prospect) NGI Zero projects to meet & greet, and have a discussion about the Next Generation Internet. It'll take place on February 1, 13.00 CET at the AW1.121 room.
On Sunday there's the NLnet office hour where you can ask us everything you want to know about the NGI Zero grants. What are the requirements, how you can apply, and more... Also welcome if you just want to come by and say hi. The Office hour takes place on February 2, 13.00 CET also at the AW1.121 room.

Presentations and talks

As the FOSDEM schedule is being released we'll be adding NLnet and NGI Zero related talks. We'll be updating this page until the event happens, because there are always last minute changes. If you are a grantee and involved in a presentation or a devroom we have not listed, let us know and we will happily add it!

(Note: The times listed may be off due to schedule changes or errors on our side. You can check the genesis FOSDEM schedule by clicking on the event's title.)

Saturday

• 10.50 ZSWatch - The Open Source Smartwatch — Daniel Kampert (ZSWatch)
• 11.00 Parula - Presenting the new email client — Ben Bucksch (Mustang - UI components)
• 11.10 How reproducible is NixOS? — Julien Malka (NixOS/Clevis)
• 11.15 Open Cloud Mesh — Michiel de Jong (Open Cloud Mesh)
• 11.30 Structured Email: Building blocks and implementation guidance — Hans-Jörg Happel (Structured Email for Roundcube)
• 11.30 15-minute city in 15 minutes — Ilya Zverev (Every Door)
• 11.35 Quick intro & update on the ODF standard. Afterwards, explain the design ideas behind TDF's ODF Toolkit and its usefulness for ODF automation. — Svante Schubert (In-document search)
• 12.00 Stalwart Mail Server — Mauro De Gennaro (Stalwart Mail Server)
• 12.30 Mox and simplifying mail server setup & management — Mechiel Lukkien (Mox management and automation)
• 12.30 Distributed real-time collaboration for Writer - a first prototype — Thorsten Behrens (LibreOffice CRDT)
• 13.00 A Practical Introduction to using sq, Sequoia PGP's CLI — Neal H. Walfield (A Secret Key Store for Sequoia PGP)
• 13.00 Ethersync – Real-time Collaboration in Your Text Editor! — blinry (Ethersync)
• 13.10 Automating Low-Level Firmware Validation with Robot Framework — Maciej Pijanowski (UEFI Capsule Update for coreboot with EDK II)
• 13.15 NextGraph : Build collaborative, local-first and decentralized apps — Niko Bonnieure (NextGraph Framework)
• 13.30 Panel : Integration between collaborative applications — Ludovic Dubost (CryptPad Auth Improvements (XWiki))
• 13.30 TrenchBoot - project status update — Maciej Pijanowski & Daniel Kiper (TrenchBoot for AMD platform in Linux kernel)
• 13.30 Panel: When is an AI system free/open? — Zoë Kooyman, julia ferraioli, Ciarán O'Riordan & Richard Fontana (JShelter Manifest V3)
• 14.00 All Open Source Toolchain for ZYNQ 7000 SoCs — Yimin Gu (PTP gateware with openXC7)
• 14.30 Katzenpost: developing privacy software in Go — Eva Infeld (Katzen Metadata Minimizing Messenger)
• 14.40 Open Source Firmware, BMC and Bootloader devroom - outro — Piotr Król (Alder Lake Desktop)
• 15.30 Breaking tech monopolies in Europe: A fireside chat with the European Commission — Lucas Lasota, Alexandre Ruiz Feases & Victor Le Pochat (Dr. Lucas Lasota works as Legal Program Manager at NGI Zero partner FSFE)
• 15.45 Weather and emergency alerts — Nucleus (FOSS Warn)
• 15.50 Lessons from rewriting systems software in Rust — Ruben Nijveld (Maintenance and portability of sudo-rs & Strengthening NTP and NTS in ntpd-rs)
• 16.00 Authentication and autoconfig for email - Update on standardization efforts — Ben Bucksch (Mustang - UI components)
• 16.10 Funkwhale presentation : to audio federation — petitminion (Funkwhale)
• 17.00 (Avoid) Implementing STARTTLS — Damian Poddebniak (imap-codec library)
• 17.05 Prove website, domain, and network ownership — Mark Overmeer (MailBox renewal)
• 17.40 Manyfold: Federating 3d models — James Smith (Manyfold)
• 17.45 Beyond Compliance: Assessing Modern Slavery Statements using the Wikirate platform — Vasiliki Gkatziaki (A Frameworks Framing)
• 18.00 Mobilizon: Decentralizing Event Management for a Privacy-Respecting Social Web — Alexandra, Stéphane (Empowering Mobilizon)
• 18.15 POSIX Signals in User Space on the Redox Microkernel — Jacob Lorentzon (Redox OS Unix-style Signals)
• 18.25 A Universal and Stable API to Everything: XMPP — Jérôme Poisson (Goffi) (Email < = > XMPP gateway)
• 18.40 postmarketOS: what is it and what's new? — Oliver Smith (postmarketOS daemons)
• 18.45 Object-Capability Security with Spritely Goblins for Secure Collaboration — Juliana Sims (Spritely (and OCapN))

Sunday

• 09.00 Next Generation Internet 2025: where next? — Michiel Leenaars (NLnet's Director of Strategy)
• 09.00 f8 - an 8 bit architecture designed for C and memory efficiency — Philipp K. Krause (f8)
• 09.05 Building Sustainability: A Case Study in Funding Diversification for Decidim — Nil Homedes (Decidim revamp)
• 09.50 ProxyGuard - WireGuard behind a reverse proxy — Jeroen Wijenbergh (Let's Connect! Client-Server to P2P)
• 10.20 VACASK and Verilog-A Distiller - building a device library for an analog circuit simulator — Árpád Bűrmen (Verilog — A distiller)
• 10.30 20 Years of Hacking the Funding of XWiki and CryptPad — Ludovic Dubost (CryptPad Auth Improvements (XWiki))
• 10.55 Flow Battery Research Collective: Building an Open-Source Battery for Stationary Storage — Kirk Smith & Josh Hauser (Redox Flow Battery)
• 11.05 Every ISP Needs To Use A QoE Middle-Box On Their Network — Frantisek (Frank) Borsik_LibreQoS (LibreQoS)
• 11.10 Constraint Logic Programming From The Perspective of Annotations — Jonathan McHugh (Icebreaker)
• 11.40 KiCad Project Status — Wayne Stambaugh (KiCad-IPC)
• 12.05 Federated Identities Anyone? We've got lots of them ... — Stephan Schwichtenberg (neuropil)
• 12.20 ngspice - XSPICE elemental devices made available in KiCad — Holger Vogt (KiCad)
• 12.30 Naja Python: ECO, Netlist Optimization, and Netlist Data Collection Made Easy with a Simple Python API — Christophe Alexandre (Naja DNL)
• 12.35 Federated Idenities Anyone? We've got lots of them ... — Stephan Schwichtenberg (neuropil)
• 12.50 The Whippet Embeddable Garbage Collection Library — Andy Wingo (Whippet)
• 13.15 Mozilla Mythbusters: Separating Fact from Fiction — Sylvestre Ledru (Strengthening NTP and NTS in ntpd-rs)
• 13.20 The Shepherd: Minimalism in PID 1 — Ludovic Courtès (Distributed GNU Shepherd)
• 13.50 Shepherd with Spritely Goblins for Secure System Layer Collaboration — Juliana Sims (Distributed GNU Shepherd)
• 14.10 Goblins: The framework for your next project! — Jessica Tallon (Spritely (and OCapN))
• 14.10 Solid, Local-First, and The Ultimate Bookkeeping System — Michiel de Jong (Federated Timesheets)
• 14.20 5 Top reasons why Governments should work together with Open Source Vendors and 5 ways on how to do it ! — Frank Karlitschek, Michael Meeks & Ludovic Dubost (Nextcloud, Collabora & CryptPad Auth Improvements (XWiki))
• 14.30 Verilog-AMS in Gnucap — felix (Verilog-AMS in Gnucap)
• 14.30 Spritely and a secure, collaborative, distributed future — Christine Lemmer-Webber (Spritely (and OCapN))
• 14.30 Implementing a triage process supporting all flavours of VEX — Anthony Harrison (BIDS: Binary Identification of Dependencies with Search)
• 14.50 The IHP OpenPDK Initiative: Status and RoadMap — Wladek Grabinski (Test Procedures for MOSFET Open Source SPICE Model Validation)
• 15.20 The OpenFlexure Microscope — Julian Stirling (Open Hardware Manuals)
• 15.40 Redox OS - a Microkernel-based Unix-like OS — Jacob Lorentzon (Redox OS Unix-style Signals)
• 15.50 Don't stand there and gawk, extend it! — Efraim Flashner (RISC-V bootstrapping effort via GNU Mes)
• 15.55 The Small Device C Compiler targeting Z80, MOS 6502 and their derivatives — Philipp K. Krause (SDCC)
• 16.35 FLOSS as a public policy: The case of Decidim — Nil Homedes (Decidim revamp)

Devrooms

While of course you should be in all dev rooms simultaneously for a total information overload, the density of NGI Zero related talks in the following rooms might be higher than elsewhere.

• Collaboration and Content Management
• Declarative and Minimalistic Computing
• DNS
• FOSS on Mobile Devices
• Funding the FOSS Ecosystem
• Geospatial
• Identity and Access Management
• Legal and Policy
• LibreOffice
• Modern Email
• Nix and NixOS
• Open Hardware and CAD/CAM
• Open Source In The European Legislative Landscape and Beyond
• Social Web
• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
• Open Source Firmware, BMC and Bootloader

Stands

During FOSDEM the university is filled to the brim with stands where you can meet the people behind many FOSS organisations, communities and projects (and collect stickers). Here is FOSDEM's overview of all the stands and their place on the map. Below is an overview of some NLnet/NGI Zero related stands.

• AlekSIS and Teckids
• CalyxOS
• Codeberg and Forgejo
• coreboot / flashprog / EDKII / OpenBMC
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• FreeCAD and KiCAD
• GNOME (home of a.o. Fractal)
• KDE (Plasma Wayland, Connect)
• Let's Encrypt
• LibreOffice Community (LO Accessible, LO Online, P2P, CRDT, Typography, Bookproject, Follow-Me Slideshow, etc)
• Linux on Mobile
• Luanti (formerly Minetest)
• MariaDB Foundation
• Mastodon
• NLnet
• Open Food Facts
• openSUSE Project
• Overte
• Panoramax
• postmarketOS
• Prossimo
• Qubes OS and Genode OS
• Realtime Lounge
• Software Heritage
• WireGuard and Linux Kernel RNG
• XWiki & CryptPad

OFFDEM

The OFFDEM unconference will be held parallel to FOSDEM. OFFDEM is an intersectional festival about collective practices and free technologies production with different types of activities. Petites Singularités is behind the organisation of the event.

FOSDEM Fringe

Coming to Brussels and want to have an early start? There are also events in the FOSDEM Fringe organised by or featuring projects we support, like the GUIX Days.

The FOSS license and security compliance tools developers and users workshop organised by AboutCode is a gathering for people who are interested in open source license and security compliance bringing together developers and users of open source compliance tools. NLnet will give a lightning talk at 09.00 to speak about its Free and Open Source funding opportunities.

On Sunday at 19.00 there is the off-site event Social Web After Hours, organized by Web Foundation and Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL). There will be four Fediverse-focused presentations from people of the ActivityPub community, among whom NGI Zero grantee Julian Lam, who will discuss NodeBB and using ActivityPub for threaded discussions.

Session "Next Generation Internet 2025: where next?"

If you've made it all the way down here: our Director of Strategy Michiel Leenaars will open up the main track session in the auditorium of K-Bulding on Sunday morning with his talk "Next Generation Internet 2025: where next?". The Next Generation Internet and its ambition to improve our digital sovereignty and create the technology stack we want, was first presented by NLnet and Gartner Europe at FOSDEM in 2018 through the study Next Generation Internet 2025. So, now it is 2025 — time to see where things ended up. In his talk at FOSDEM, Michiel will look back at NGI's accomplishments, including an impressive portfolio of funded projects, as well as look forward: despite the continuously increasing importance of technological sovereignty, NGI has not secured a place in the European Commission's future plans yet. So what should our new European Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy be working on for the next five years of the 'digital decade'? Starting from the vantage point of the Next Generation Internet initiative in 2025, where do we go?