This post is feedback about my experience at FOSDEM 2025 at Brussels, Belgium: https://fosdem.org/2025/ and https://fosdem.org/2025/about/
Vibe
Last year, I went to FOSDEM 2024. My agenda was full of talks and the two days were just running between the building. As demonstrated by the famous FOSDEM dance:
FOSDEM 2024 was exhausting for me, so this year I made the decision to attend less talk and do more socializing.
Exchange with the Open Source community and gaining experience
I decided to spend more time in exchanging with other people. Discussing with the open source community: discuss new projects, get experience on how other open source projects are managed or how other people work.
In bars every night after the FOSDEM or at the cafeteria.
And I also attended one "Birds Of a Feather" (BOF) conference. Which is a session in a small room where everyone that want to discuss the defined subject is free to join. This year I attended the "Archlinux BOF" one.
There were the maintainers of ArchLinux which answered all the questions from the users. The atmosphere of the room made it very pleasant to discuss and listen to the different people.
Maybe next year FOSDEM could get a BOF room about geospatial?
Talks
Geospatial
This year is the return of the geospatial track. We had some great talks, of which one of them was presented by Olivia Guyot about OpenLayers! The list is here: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/geospatial/
One talk that interested me was "MapTCHA, the open source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap". It's a proof of concept of a CAPTCHA with OSM geospatial data.
A reCAPTCHA like but open source and with OSM data instead of Google Maps data.
About Open Source funding
A Camptocamp, we have to finance a lot of open source projects. I bookmarked a lot of interesting talks in order to discover how others are doing and also gather interesting ideas that could get used at Camptocamp. (I did not attend all of them)
- What do maintainers need from funders and others? We asked Maintainers to find out.
- Why and How Companies Should Pay Open Source Maintainers
- Funding FOSS together: Combining public and private efforts
- When is it Right to Say No to Funding?
- How do we get the European Union to invest in FOSS maintenance and security?
- Open source funding: you’re doing it wrong
Other very interesting talks that I attended
Google photos "clone" but that you can host yourself and is open source.
The speaker talked about how Nextcloud talk can be an open source alternative to Microsoft Teams.
Let's Encrypt explained what has changed since the project was created, 10 years ago. And with a new feature that they are offering to the public!
All the other talks
There are many talks that I wanted to attend but was unable to. It's fine because FOSDEM has a recording of all of them, and it's available in the schedule: Saturday and Sunday.
The list is huge, so you might want to find talks that might interest you by topic instead: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/tracks/.
Final notes
FOSDEM has turned 25 years. This year there have been many more speakers compared to last year, 1184 speakers this year compared to 933 last year!
I'm looking for next FOSDEM 😃!
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