I was invited to FOSDEM 2024 as a part of the Fedora Project stand and speaker team to Belgium. I also got the opportunity to attend other adjacent events and gain insights about the different types of technological innovations which are happening in open source.
I was also mesmerized by the style in which these conferences were conducted — each one standing out in their own unique way.
CHAOSS is a Linux Foundation project focused on creating metrics, metrics models, and software to better understand open source community health on a global scale. CHAOSS is an acronym for Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software.
CHAOSScon is a community organized event providing a venue for discussing open-source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open-source project health. This year, it was co-located with FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium
I was a bit jet-lagged that day because I had just arrived a day before but I enjoyed it a lot. This was my first conference in which we were supposed to break out in small discussion groups of 3 people and speak for 2 minutes about a prompt related to the talk delivered.
One of my favourite talks was “University OSS, OSPOs and Metrics” by Claire Dillon. After her talk, I was grouped with Celeste Hogan and Emmy Tsang where I discussed the stability in funding for research projects, metric communications and possible curriculum changes.
My second group discussion was with Kristi Progri and Nicholas Griffin on the topic of “the balance between Transparency and Privacy”. We came up with some innovative ideas on letting users know better how their data is used and let developers know how and where their code is being used. We also discussed how to make this information available in simpler forms by avoiding jargons.
https://floss.social/@jwf/111855717719279998
Julia Ferraioli delivering her keynote
I loved how these discussion follow-ups made us focus more on the talks.
My favourite keynote was on “Best Practices for Research in Open-Source Ecosystems” by Julia Ferraioli. Her talk made me realise how not all user surveys for UX researchs are okay. She gave an example of a 2021 research being conducted and explained how what began as a ‘user research’ became a ‘human experiment’. It made me think more closely about integrity and respect which must be maintained while churning data.
FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C24h3gPgq1h/?img_index=1
This was the first time I had been to a conference that had booths in it.
Besides taking shifts at the Fedora Booth, I went around to other ones and attended the Open Source Design devroom talks. All of the talks were very effective and interesting. The ‘Thunderbird Visual Change’ talk by Alessandro Castellani emphasised the need of change and how familiarity in design sometimes needs to break a little to deliver better performance. I was impressed by how Alexander Solo brought with him not just a talk, but also a prototype of his E-ink product: Modos. The Liquid Prompt talk by Nojhan presented a more inclusive design of reading the shell prompt by providing a monochrome scheme for color blind people.
The talk by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka on Bad UX is Bad Security was my favourite. Her presentation style was very involving and her talk presented how adding friction to a process can ensure security measures and reduce mistakes.
https://floss.social/@jwf/111867014577158553
Me with Tracy Homer (right) at the SFC booth
I feel that the design devroom was too small to accomodate the audience it received. I hope to see a bigger room to be allocated next year! I also found it interesting to have a job board in the event. I participated in by putting up a job poster and received a bunch of replies too! I was even reached out by a 2013 alumnus from my college, IIT Roorkee.
Going around in booths, I found a lot of interesting ideas about data collection in FDM and using it for better analysis too. I was extremely happy to meet Tracy Homer at FOSDEM, with whom I had been working for Software Freedom Conservancy’s graphic design requirements.