Last weekend I attended FOSDEM (and FOSDEM PGDay), but because I brought my 11-year old with me, couldn't stick to the murderous schedule I normally have for myself. People who have seen my Itinerary of Doom in previous years, which includes backup (and backup-backup) talks for when a devroom is full, and also scheduled bathroom breaks, know what's up. Anyway, I was a lot more restricted this year, and have a lot more sessions than usual to watch the recordings of.
In case you're interested, here's my watchlist, ordered by devroom.
Community
- There are No Adults in the Room: Learning how to Grow Up as a Team - Oren Klopfer, A. Salt, Elisabeth Wenger-Stickel (technically a re-watch)
- Downstream Mindset vs Upstream Communities - Ildiko Vancsa
- The CRA isn't coming for your open source community - Tobie Langel (Tobie! We didn't even meet in the tram this year!!)
- The Synthetic Senior: Rethinking Free Software Mentorship in the AI Era - Abigail Cabunoc Mayes
- From Vibrant to Silent: Has the Community Lost Its Voice? - Prithvi Raj
- Headscale & Tailscale: The complementary open source clone - Kristoffer Dalby
- Self-Raising Lazarus: All Contributors and how Open Source can Rise Again - Jim Madge
- Building on Success: Sustainability of Open Source - Ruth Suehle
- Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together - Miranda Heath
- The AI Shockwave in Open Source Communities: How AI Is Reshaping the Foundations of Open Source Communities - David Allen, Amanda Victoria Wagner
CRA in practice
- Software Supply Chain Strategy at Deutsche Bahn - Max Mehl, Henry Sachs
- Building CRA-Ready Open Source Communities: The Critical Role of Community Managers - Cynthia Lo, Cassie Jiun seo
- Panel: From Minimum Compliance to Meaningful Stewardship - Salve J. Nilsen, Kate Stewart, Madalin Neag, Pavel Hruza
Databases
- PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives - Rohit Nayak, Shlomi Noach, Ben Dicken, Pep Pla
- Cracking Down the Code: What Really Happens When You Run a SELECT? - Charly Batista
- Data on Kubernetes / stateless storage - Matthias Crauwels
- Delegating SQL Parsing to PostgreSQL - Greg Potter
- Contributing to MariaDB & Postgres - Kevin Biju, Georgi Kodinov
- How to Prevent Your AI from Returning Garbage: It Starts and Ends with Data Engineering - Matt Yonkovit
Funding the FOSS Ecosystem
- Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure: A Detailed Case for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund - Nicholas Gates, Felix Reda, Jennifer Tridgell
- Funding Lessons Learned Panel - Maria Majadas, Guillaume Monnet, Sriram Ramkrishna, Hannes Mühleisen, Lucie Anglade, Guillaume Ayoub
- Ecosystems, Not Projects: Rethinking Open Source Foundation Funding - Bill Mulligan, Patrick Masson
Geospatial
- Lessons from teaching 100+ beginners to use the OpenStreetMap - Bogomil Shopov - Бого
Legal & Policy
- From Policy To Practice; Open Source in The Dutch Government - Gina Plat
- Unique Challenges in Elected Governing Bodies for FOSS - Deb Bryant, Bradley M. Kühn, Richard Fontana, Joe Brockmeier, Ian Kelling
Main
- What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn? - Mike McQuaid
- Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source? - Marga Manterola
- Strategy for Trusting your Employer in Open Source: a Historical Approach - James Bottomley
- Open Source Security in spite of AI - Daniel Stenberg
Open Source & EU Policy
- The Fediverse and the EU's Digital Services Act: solving the challenges of modern social media? - Jordan Maris, Sandra Barthel, Hannah Aubry, Alexandra Geese
- Age verification: a threat to the open-source ecosystem - Ella Jakubowska
- Could Compliance Costs Sustain FOSS? A Theory of Voluntary Attestations - Æva Black
- Could Compliance Costs Sustain FOSS? A Panel With The Public Sector - Æva Black, Michael Schuster, Greg Wallace, Tommaso Bernabo'
- Participating in Standardisation around the CRA - Simon Phipps, Jordan Maris
- Effective standard-setting - Tobie Langel
SBOMS and supply chains
- Deutsche Bahn's Approach to Large-Scale SBOM Collection and Use - Max Mehl, Henry Sachs
- How public administrations are shifting their software supply chain paradigms – and why now - Julian Schauder
Testing and Continuous Delivery
- Developer Experience is more than just Productivity metrics - Jeremy Meiss
... and the closing session too! Watching a few a day will get me through dreary February. Share your recommendations in the comments?
My talk with fellow Devopsdays-er Jos van Schouten "What happens if someone breaks the rules?" is also live: fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/NGEWWJ-what_happens_if_someone_breaks_the_rules/
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