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!

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI-powered tools are changing how software is written. What do licenses for data and models look like? Whose ethics become the ethics of the AI systems we will all eventually depend on? What are the coming security and privacy concerns? Will the systems of governance we understand in open source software change around AI projects? What's currently happening in court systems around the world in the area of copyright and AI training that may impact how copyleft functions both in practice and as a strategy? What policies have been adopted by GNU/Linux distributions and other projects about using and distributing AI-generated materials, and have these policies been successful? What options are out there for "fully free" AI assistants, and what does that mean? We invite proposals about all of these questions and more.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Diversity, Equity, and inclusion are receiving increased attention in the FOSS community, the broader technology industry, and beyond. Since free and open software, hardware, and standards are made by people with very different backgrounds, beliefs, disabilities, nationalities, and identities, it is important to ensure access for these different groups and enable them to participate in a healthy way. This conference track provides a space to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges and solutions. We invite submissions from practitioners who share their own stories and what strategies they have tried to improve DEI, regardless of whether they succeeded or failed. We invite submission focused on DEI in FOSS, DEI beyond FOSS, and personal DEI experiences.

FOSS and arm64; from the Cloud to the Edge

Every major public cloud now has arm64 (Aarch64) servers in their data centers. These servers are high performance, cloud native machines. With their large core counts and low power usage, data centers are moving more and more users to these machines to cut their electricity costs and maximize the amount of compute per rack in the data center. Yet, the Edge also needs high performance low power machines. Whether these are IoT Hubs collecting sensor data on the shop floor or a server at the base of a cell tower for CDN services.

FOSS Funding and Economics

This track will cover all sorts of angles to the core question of how FOSS work gets economic support. We would like to include people from both for-profit and non-profit organizations where producing FOSS is not their main focus. Do they support employees contributing to FOSS? Do they give out any funding to FOSS? Do they pay for proprietary software licenses? We would like to hear from FOSS projects about their funding challenges, sources, history, and so on. We would like to see panel conversations on different perspectives on funding. We would like to explicitly include perspectives that contrast FOSS projects that are mostly used by developers and sysadmins versus FOSS projects meant for use by the general public and how their funding challenges differ. We would like to include political perspectives where people put FOSS funding in context of the issues of our overall economic system. Perhaps we can get contrasting perspectives from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and skeptics.

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.

FOSS in Education

Educational institutions have a long and impactful history in the development of multiple open initiatives. In addition to free and open source software, colleges and universities have played significant roles in producing and propagating a variety of other open educational resources, for example, open content, textbooks and courses, open access journals, open data, science and research. Institutions of higher education play an essential role across several free and open source communities. As adopters, campuses occupy a unique space in--and provide a unique perspective for--the use of free and open source software at the enterprise level, often in conjunction with government and research institutions. At the same time, campus constituencies--students, staff, and faculty--provide yet another perspective as independent desktop and mobile end users. Higher education is also fertile ground for development; educating the next generation of developers while often actively creating and managing their own projects and communities of practice. The FOSS For Education Community Track would provide sessions dedicated to using, developing, and managing open resources within academic environments, from multi-institutional consortia to departmental projects. The track organizers would emphasize presentations and topics highlighting the common principles, practices, benefits, challenges, and models spanning the variety of open initiatives impacting teaching and learning environments and campus administration.

Keynote panels

One of the features attendees at FOSSY 2023 appreciated most were the keynote panel discussions focused on timely, salient issues for the free software community. We invite proposals for lively, diverse panels addressing key issues, threats, and opportunities for the free software community in 2024. We are specifically looking for panels or other interactive, conversational formats.

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.

Mobile Device User Freedom

Much has happened since FOSSY 2023 in the area of mobile app store regulation and legislation worldwide, as well as in the development of mobile-first free software. We invite talks looking at the policy landscape and movement strategy around mobile devices, as well as talks about free software mobile OS and app projects -- including but certainly not limited to F-Droid, Postmarket OS, Mobian, CalyxOS, and Replicant.

Reproducibility

In this track, we invite talk proposals focused on the important theme of binary reproducibility -- making it so anyone can see for themselves that a particular set of source files when built produces a particular binary. Talks might address how this is done; why it is important for science, security, and privacy; how advocacy for the practice is progressing; or any other related facet.

Right to Repair

There is significant overlap between the software freedom and right to repair movements. As we see more and more intersection in activism, legislation, and open technology, we hope to foster a more symbiotic relationship between the spaces. If you have expertise in software freedom and would like to apply that to right to repair issues, or vice versa, please submit your talk! Likewise if you have been following the developments in related policies in places like Oregon and have information to share.

SFC Member Projects

As a fiscal sponsor for a multitude of important and vital free software projects, Software Freedom Conservancy takes pride in providing alternatives to proprietary software, funding FOSS infrastructure and making sure important FOSS projects have a legal home. This track features talks about any of the [projects whose organizational home is SFC](https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/) -- Git, Inkscape, Selenium, Racket, and so many more!

Science of Community

What can research tell us about building FOSS communities? We invite presentations from academic and industry researchers working on and with FOSS, FOSS practitioners (e.g. project leaders, community leaders, maintainers, moderators), and students who are interested in engaging with FOSS research. In this track, we will include opportunities for researchers to talk with practitioners (about their research), practitioners to talk with researchers (about their needs), and researchers to talk with researchers (for learning and collaboration). Some of the most important collaborations are those between practitioners and researchers; this can only happen when they have a chance to get to know each other.

Supporting User Groups

An important aspect of fostering community is to have users organize users groups in their local communities. When an open source project has contributors all around the planet, user groups help foster a sense of community, helps with shared learnings and nurtures community members in their journey of contributing to open source. In this track, we will discuss best practices on organizing user groups, promoting and inspiring the community, identifying the initial opportunity to start user groups, tools to offer user group organizers, identifying speakers in the community, and making user groups sustainable.

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.