FOSDEM

Like previous years, there will be a keysigning party at FOSDEM.

GPG/PGP keysigning

A PGP Keysigning Party is a meeting where people exchange "PGP key fingerprints" in a secure way. These meetings are quite often fun too.
Exchanging key fingerprints enables one to strengthen the "web of trust". Even if your key has already been signed by others, it's useful to attend such a party: the more people have signed your key, the more trustworthy your key can be to others.
Instructions on how to join the PGP Keysigning Party are published at ksp.mdcc.cx.

CACert

CAcert.org is a community-driven certificate authority that issues free public key certificates to the public.
To create higher-trust certificates, users can participate in a web of trust system whereby users physically meet and verify each other's identities. CAcert maintains the number of assurance points for each account. Assurance points can be gained by having one's identity physically verified by users classified as "Assurers" during keysigning parties.
Having more assurance points allows users more privileges such as writing a name in the certificate, longer expiration times on certificates.

The list of Main Track speakers for FOSDEM 2009 is almost complete and officially announced today, even though the website does not contain all the speaker bios and abstracts yet.

The keynotes will be highly interesting and entertaining, as always:

• Mark Surman discussing the Free. Open. Future?,
• Bdale Garbee talking about Debian, and
• Leslie Hawthorn, opening the Summer Of Code Internals to all of us.

Keeping our tradition of high quality technical talks, the main tracks for 2009 will be organized around 6 topics and feature a wealth of project leads and core developers from all around the FOSS horizon:

• Collaboration: MediaWiki (Brion Vibber), Zarafa (Steve Hardy)
• Development and Languages: OpenAMQ (Pieter Hintjens), Reverse Engineering of Proprietary Protocols (Rob Savoye ) and Scala (Martin Odersky)
• Security: FreeIPA, identity Management (Simo Sorce), Fusil (Victor Stinner)
• Kernel: Syslinux (H Peter Anvin), Ext4 (Theodore Ts'o) and Help my system is slow... (Kris Kennaway)
• Distributions: The Fedora Project (Max Spevack), OpenSUSE ()
• System Administration: MySQL High Availability Solutions (Lenz Grimmer) and Upstart (Scott James Remnant)

These are the projects that are participating in FOSDEM 2009 with a lightningtalk, in probable sequential order.
Saturday: Linux Defenders, Small Sister, FLOSSMetrics, Bazaar, Caiman, Apache Felix, Opsview, Marionnet, LXDE, Camelot, hackable:1, BUG, usbpicprog, Gemvid.
Sunday morning: GnuTLS, mailman-pgp-smime, JTRunner, IPN & msockets, ModularIT, Puppet.
Sunday afternoon: FreedroidRPG, SGX Engine, MuseScore, PyRoom, eZ Find, XWiki, TikiWiki, Midgard, CalDAV.

As every year, there will be a FOSDEM beer event on Friday night before FOSDEM (6 February 2009).

Like last year, this year's event will take place at the Delirium Café, in a beautiful gallery near the Grand'Place in Brussels. In addition to the enormous variety in beers, the location also has enough room to accomodate the enormous crowd of geeks we tend to be.

These are the projects that are participating in FOSDEM 2009 with a stand, in alphabetical order: *BSD, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Free Software Foundation Europe + Free Knowledge Foundation, Gentoo, GNOME, Haiku, Jabber/XMPP, Joomla, KDE, Mandriva, Mozilla, MySQL, OpenEmbedded, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, OpenWRT, PHP, PostgreSQL, SIP Communicator, Syllable, ReactOS, Ubuntu.

These are the projects that are participating in FOSDEM 2009 with a Developer Room, in alphabetical order: *BSD + PostgreSQL, Ada (user group), Cross Desktop (GNOME + KDE + XFCE), Debian, Drupal, Embedded (various FOSS projects related to embedded platforms), Fedora + CentOS, Free Java (OpenJDK and friends), GNOME, Jabber/XMPP, KDE, MySQL, Mozilla, OpenGroupware.org + GNUstep + Etoilé, OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, Ruby and Rails (Belgian Ruby User Group), X.org.

Spouses/partners: enjoy a guided tour of Brussels while your favourite geek attends FOSDEM !

FOSDEM hires professional guides for both afternoons of FOSDEM. One afternoon to show the well-known sights, and one afternoon to give an overview of the neighbourhoods of the city. The tours start and end on the campus, and we make sure the sunday tour is back at 4pm. Please register ...

The call for devrooms and stands for FOSDEM 2009 is closed.
All available rooms and stands have been assigned.
Thanks for the many requests, and sorry to those we could not fulfill.

A list of FOSS projects present at FOSDEM 2009 with a devroom and/or a stand will be announced soon.

Update promotion material (banners, web badges) for FOSDEM 2009 are now available.

If you appreciate the event, you might want to help us spread the word about it by including one of our 2009 badges or banners on your site or blog.

We sometimes get the "How do I register" question from the newcomers. Here is the answer:

New Visitor wrote:
> I wanna go to FOSDEM 2009, but totally new, so how do I sign up?

You don't need to sign up. *Entrance is free of charge* to everyone (even 
though we accept voluntary donations to keep the event alive :)).

There's no registration nor anything similar. You just come 
to the venue during the week-end and that's all.

> My guess is, that I just show up, but it would probably be a help
> for newcomers, if you created a sub-page of "Practical Information"
> called "Registration."

There is no such thing as registration for FOSDEM ;)