6 ms·

FOSDEM 2023: Glad to Be Back

75 points by edward 4y ago

radicalbyte 4y ago
It was my first time this year, took my boy with me (9) who loved it. Especially being introduced to coding Ada. What struck me is how kind and nice everyone was to him, always encouraging and he was showered with small gifts. So here's a massive thanks from me to everyone involved! We'll be back next year :)
- college_physics 4y ago
  OP laments the lack of diversity at FOSDEM. At least here we have an example of age diversity :-). But maybe a "Kids FOSDEM" is not a bad idea at all?!
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    OP doesn't really understand that outside of the US people are more than black, white and Asian. It's not that long ago that the chairman of one of the most powerful German parties asked the population to report people if they hear them speak Arabic. In the US whether you're Arab, Turkish, Greek, Iranian, etc. unless you're one of the darker Arabs they're all seen as white Caucasian to the average Joe. There was a report not long ago that people with Turkish names are half as likely to get a job in Germany. So the average Joe wouldn't understand that places such as FOSDEM are very diverse and very welcoming to any one of those backgrounds. There was a blog post complaining about the lack of diversity at FOSDEM a couple of years back. Everyone was thrown in the "white Caucasian male" bucket. But that's less a testimony of FOSDEMs diversity and more one of the ignorance of a certain demographic that likes to look at the world through its own lens.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      Why do you believe that OP is American (he's not - https://diego.codes/about/ https://diego.codes/about/)? Besides, he mentions gender diversity more than ethnicity.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      The OP isn’t American, so they presumably understand the things you’re saying. But there’s a disconnect here: the OP highlights poor gender representation, not any of the things you’ve said.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    About 95% of the visitors were men aged from 30-60 and a large proportion of those (including yours truly) could do with dropping a few kilo's. I don't particularly care about the gender / race / size of people presenting or visiting as long as everyone is treated fairly and properly. Which seemed the case. Diversity of thought - that is extremely important - and that was on display to a point. I was really disappointed to not see anything from my favoured platform - C# - which would represent conceptual diversity. Which is a shame because the more that we normalise OSS in that ecosystem the better.
    - fignews 4y ago
      Ended up speaking to a C# dev from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland but obviously not a common language.
      - radicalbyte 4y ago
        It's one of the major languages, just not so much in the OSS community because of the culture of Microsoft hate. Which made sense back then - Microsoft (and Apple) both earned that for what they did to Amiga. However Oracle are currently much worse but you never hear people hating on Java for that (they hate on Java because change is glacial, which is a symptom of Oracle).
    - college_physics 4y ago
      > Diversity of thought - that is extremely important The beauty of gender and ethnic diversity is that it help with diversity of thought as well. From motivating tech for more diverse sets of applications, to making it more inclusive in terms of localization, removing subtle biases in implementations (e.g. music tools that do not reflect purely western music traditions - to mention something concrete) Its a tough nut to crack, as we don't need token initiatives but ideas that are authentic in the OSS context and can undo the entrenched society-wide lack of inclusion for certain groups.
      - 0x445442 4y ago
        Society doesn’t need equal representation in every field of endeavor. It only needs to remove institutional barriers to entry. I’d argue those barriers really don’t exist now and that lamenting over group preferences is a fool’s errand. I don’t see those lamenting over the lack of “diversity” in STEM having any issue with the lack of diversity in the NBA.
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    Yeah, it’s a racist comment because it assumes one has to have such and such skin color or such and such gender to be different. There’s an infinite number of characteristics that make us individuals, skin color and gender are just two.
  - zxspectrum1982 4y ago
    I have organized devrooms at FOSDEM for almost 15 years. That thing about "lack of diversity" is bullshit, plain and simple. If women, or gays, or trans, or people with disabilities, don't submit talks, then they will not get talks accepted. And I'm not going to chase them begging them to submit talks or insert some talk just because they belong of a "minority". That would be unfair to the people that took the time and effort to actually submit a proper talk. Oh, by the way, I have no way of knowing whether someone is gay, trans, disabled or whatever because all I see is a 1-2 paragraph bio and a 2-3 paragraph proposal and title. Stop blaming yourself for being a white man.
    - spencerchubb 4y ago
      I would really prefer to be at a diverse conference. To make the conference experience as good as possible, maybe it would be wise to actively seek out diverse speakers if they are not applying.
      - guntherhermann 4y ago
        FOSDEM is a diverse conference, it's great. If you've never been, go and then criticise if you don't like it. Don't rely on second hand information to make up your mind.
      - zxspectrum1982 4y ago
        No, it wouldn't be. If those "diverse people" want to be at FOSDEM, they will need to follow the same rules everybody follows.
      - JuniorBalleg 4y ago
        [flagged]
        spencerchubb 4y ago
        A reason why I dislike homogeneous environments is because I feel like the odd one out. If most people in a room are of the same demographic, and I don't fit that demographic, then I feel like an outsider. It is hard to interpret your question as sincere when you imply that people want diversity so they can pick up women.
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
I quite enjoyed this conference mostly for how ridiculously packed it was. It was the first tech conference where I was that truly felt like pre-covid times. However it made it painfully obvious how incredibly non diverse the crowd and talks were. With many of the more commercial conferences I was it did not feel that way, probably mostly because of how much support personal was there to balance it out at least on the hallways and booths.
- dom96 4y ago
  It's a shame that it's still so packed even after COVID. The main thing that I disliked about FOSDEM when I was there in 2018/2019/2020 was the frustration of getting to a talk you are interested in and finding it's full from the previous talk. This happened for pretty much all talks I wished to attend. FOSDEM in some sense is a victim of its own success.
Tepix 4y ago
FOSDEM running out of room is not an easy problem to fix. They get the entire university campus for free, the conference is free and changing that would be the end of FOSDEM, unless perhaps a huge sponsorship pops up.
rsynnott 4y ago
> I understand that this is not an easy issue to tackle: FOSDEM has no entry tickets, but I am sure that most attendees would gladly fill out a quick interest check to help the organization tackle this issue. Hmm, I haven't been in a while, and maybe I'm misremembering, but my impression was that the issue wasn't that space was being poorly allocated, but that there just generally wasn't enough space.
- wink 4y ago
  Yes and no. For some topics they simply don't have the amount of huge rooms, but sometimes they've also been misreading the audience and had put something that had gotten a lot of traction the last months in a tiny dev room (I think Go was like that, many years ago). No blame here of course, it's run by volunteers and I think they're doing a stellar job. I'm also not sure if there would be any meaningful response "Yes, I plan to attend X Y Z dev rooms" - if only 10% fill that out, is that a good trend? Is 10% even realistic?
  - kreetx 4y ago
    Nix was like this this year: the first events were all full with a long queue behind the door.
robert_foss 4y ago
FOSDEM is unique when it comes to conferences. Not only is it free, but a lot of open source projects are represented there both in terms of talks/booths/devrooms.
lucumo 4y ago
Every year I'm surprised at how badly maintained both ULB and Brussels as a whole is. Everything is filthy, vandalized and broken. Is it like that everywhere in Belgium? Or is just Brussels?
- thiscatis 4y ago
  Brussels in general for sure, there are nice areas but it's a decaying city with no real solutions. Having said that, it adds to the charm of universities and I guess you have older and newer campus buildings in every school.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  It reminded me of the UK.
- fignews 4y ago
  Before FOSDEM I did some walking around Brussels and came across the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) campus which I'm not sure is connected to ULB but it seemed to be in even worse shape. I loved it because the campus felt a bit like a dystopian cyberpunk world. That being said I'm currently attending Cfgmgmtcamp in Ghent at the HoGent university campus and It's in a beautiful well maintained building. Maybe it's also slowly decaying :)
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    VUB and ULB split in 1970 to be Dutch-speaking and French-speaking respectively.
- mariusor 4y ago
  I think the winter period has also a tendency to show the how gray Belgium really is. In the summer the ULB campus is much nicer in my opinion.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Maintaining stuff is not sexy. Look around. People prefer to tear things down and rebuild it or buy new stuff instead of repairing. This, and a lack of funding.
dtx1 4y ago
FOSDEM was great but our whole group got covid... Anyone else got it?
- fignews 4y ago
  Not yet. Not surprising though considering the insanely high density of people...
  - dtx1 4y ago
    And a few rooms lacking any ventilation. The Golang Room was terrible in particular
- kreetx 4y ago
  What rooms did you go to? ;)
  - dtx1 4y ago
    golang room mostly and the one with the talk about emulators on psp
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  It's only Tuesday! If you have it now surely you went there with it already.
  - dtx1 4y ago
    Nope, 100% not because I live basically in Isolation and a lot of people in my party got it aswell.
ki_ 4y ago
> FOSDEM is dominated by a very telling lack of diversity No one cares about a persons gender or skin color. We care about the information that's being shared. Only racists and sexists care about the gender and skin color of the speakers.
- exitb 4y ago
  While I don't believe it's really FOSDEM's job to fix - after all speakers for a high profile conference don't appear out of nowhere, it's a fair question to ask - where are all the people different from us?
  - ki_ 4y ago
    Well, there is nothing to fix. As long as the speakers are picked based on their content, everything is fine. But OP suggests we pick speakers based on their skin color... that's fucked up.
    - gabrielgio 4y ago
      Noone is saying that you should pick someone only based on the skin color. The idea is to bring people, that for some reason is being marginalized by the community in general, to speak. Like the person above mention "where are all the people different from us?". The world is composed roughly by 50% female? Why are not there 50% in CS as well?
      - ki_ 4y ago
        You cant balance it. In order to balance it, you already have to put these people into certain boxes, which is already pretty offensive. Then you'll have to descriminate against people in certain boxes in order to balance it. ITS WRONG. Stop grouping people up based on their skin color or sex or whatever. stop it.
        gabrielgio 4y ago
        > ITS WRONG. Stop grouping people up based on their skin color or sex or whatever. stop it. You are assuming a lot there. I haven’t done and said none of it. I never advocated for quotas. > You cant balance it. You can’t indeed if you deny there may be a problem in the first place.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
The pandemic is still going on and there are zero mandates or restrictions. This means people that are at risk or more vulnerable can't attend these events safely. The collective response has been to shrug this off and cast these folks out of society. This should be no surprise that it leads to less diverse crowds. The only people that will go to in person events are those that are privileged enough to do so safely and have access to resources to treat illness if/when they catch it.
- soupbowl 4y ago
  White men are privileged enough to go conferences safely without getting sick. We should put a quota on them going to the events to make it more equitable for other races with weak immune systems.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    No we should make conferences accessible by offering virtual/streaming/hybrid, by focusing on ventilation (measuring CO2 in rooms and moving more air), limiting attendance in packed rooms, mandating vaccinations and boosters, mandating masks in public areas, etc. Basic stuff. Think of disabled people in wheelchairs. We don't say "well we better cut back on able bodied attendees to encourage more disabled"... we build f'in wheelchair ramps and accommodate them. Same thing for COVID and mitigating air spread disabling diseases should apply.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I’m in complete agreement with you, but I’ll note that FOSDEM fails even your weaker test: I personally witnessed someone in a wheelchair being unable to access a talk because the room’s entrance (a curved staircase) couldn’t accommodate their chair. ULB is certainly a fun campus to have FOSDEM on (and I don’t have any real alternatives, given its size and location), but accessibility already seems to be relatively low on the list of concerns.
wdroz 4y ago
> FOSDEM is dominated by a very telling lack of diversity. We could argue that this is a characteristic of the technology and CS world and that FOSDEM simply inherits it. However, it is 2023, and we should do better. Having roughly a 10% of female speakers 1 with not even a clear upwards trend is not representative of the industry anymore, and it is certainly not inviting for a conference that (I think) tries to be a safe space. This is tiring... FYI "There are fewer women in open source than in the ICT sector overall"[0] [0] -- https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/where-are-women-open-source https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...
woodruffw 4y ago
I’m disappointed by the fixation in these comments on the sole piece of constructive criticism in TFA: I was also at FOSDEM, and it’s easily the least diverse tech conference I go to, cybersecurity or otherwise. I don’t think the FOSDEM organizers or community are bigoted or particularly prejudiced. But that’s the entire point: you don’t need to be either of those things to maintain a status quo.
jancsika 4y ago
1. In the picture, it looks like there is a guy wearing a teal mask on the back of his neck. This is in an auditorium of 99% of people not wearing masks at all. If you're here on HN, guy-- what's up? I'm guessing pandemic fatigue. Then again, maybe that's not a mask at all, in which case... well, I'm guessing pandemic fatigue again, I suppose. :) 2. Did anyone here attend FOSDEM while wearing a (DIY) fit-tested N95 mask? If so, did you meet anyone else in attendance who was wearing a (DIY) fit-tested N95 mask?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Not the OP, but I was there. I would say less than 5% of people were wearing masks, which was more than anywhere else I saw in Brussels. Of the people wearing masks, most were wearing form-fitting N95s or similar. I didn’t see any DIY masks.
- zevv 4y ago
  Very few people were wearing masks; I was on the bus from the city center to the venue, which was stuffed with people to the brim. The driver announced that wearing masks was recommended, though not mandatory. I was the only one wearing a mask.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    > I was the only one wearing a mask. Was it a (DIY) fit-tested N95? :)
BonfaceKilz 4y ago
On diversity, just a minor thing I observed: Me (African country) and a colleague of mine (some Asian country) got our visas - for a short stay Schengen visa - denied despite being co-organizers and volunteers for one of the dev rooms. The commentary here is that it's difficult (and expensive) for minorities (non-US and non-European peoples) to get into Brussels, moreso with the refugee crisis. It sucks. I'm not entitled to getting a visa, but it would be nice if, like some folks, I could plan myself and just show up. But it is what it is.

75 points by edward 4y ago

It was my first time this year, took my boy with me (9) who loved it. Especially being introduced to coding Ada. What struck me is how kind and nice everyone was to him, always encouraging and he was showered with small gifts. So here's a massive thanks from me to everyone involved! We'll be back next year :)

college_physics 4y ago
OP laments the lack of diversity at FOSDEM. At least here we have an example of age diversity :-). But maybe a "Kids FOSDEM" is not a bad idea at all?!
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  OP doesn't really understand that outside of the US people are more than black, white and Asian. It's not that long ago that the chairman of one of the most powerful German parties asked the population to report people if they hear them speak Arabic. In the US whether you're Arab, Turkish, Greek, Iranian, etc. unless you're one of the darker Arabs they're all seen as white Caucasian to the average Joe. There was a report not long ago that people with Turkish names are half as likely to get a job in Germany. So the average Joe wouldn't understand that places such as FOSDEM are very diverse and very welcoming to any one of those backgrounds. There was a blog post complaining about the lack of diversity at FOSDEM a couple of years back. Everyone was thrown in the "white Caucasian male" bucket. But that's less a testimony of FOSDEMs diversity and more one of the ignorance of a certain demographic that likes to look at the world through its own lens.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    Why do you believe that OP is American (he's not - https://diego.codes/about/ https://diego.codes/about/)? Besides, he mentions gender diversity more than ethnicity.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    The OP isn’t American, so they presumably understand the things you’re saying. But there’s a disconnect here: the OP highlights poor gender representation, not any of the things you’ve said.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  About 95% of the visitors were men aged from 30-60 and a large proportion of those (including yours truly) could do with dropping a few kilo's. I don't particularly care about the gender / race / size of people presenting or visiting as long as everyone is treated fairly and properly. Which seemed the case. Diversity of thought - that is extremely important - and that was on display to a point. I was really disappointed to not see anything from my favoured platform - C# - which would represent conceptual diversity. Which is a shame because the more that we normalise OSS in that ecosystem the better.
  - fignews 4y ago
    Ended up speaking to a C# dev from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland but obviously not a common language.
    - radicalbyte 4y ago
      It's one of the major languages, just not so much in the OSS community because of the culture of Microsoft hate. Which made sense back then - Microsoft (and Apple) both earned that for what they did to Amiga. However Oracle are currently much worse but you never hear people hating on Java for that (they hate on Java because change is glacial, which is a symptom of Oracle).
  - college_physics 4y ago
    > Diversity of thought - that is extremely important The beauty of gender and ethnic diversity is that it help with diversity of thought as well. From motivating tech for more diverse sets of applications, to making it more inclusive in terms of localization, removing subtle biases in implementations (e.g. music tools that do not reflect purely western music traditions - to mention something concrete) Its a tough nut to crack, as we don't need token initiatives but ideas that are authentic in the OSS context and can undo the entrenched society-wide lack of inclusion for certain groups.
    - 0x445442 4y ago
      Society doesn’t need equal representation in every field of endeavor. It only needs to remove institutional barriers to entry. I’d argue those barriers really don’t exist now and that lamenting over group preferences is a fool’s errand. I don’t see those lamenting over the lack of “diversity” in STEM having any issue with the lack of diversity in the NBA.
- 0x445442 4y ago
  Yeah, it’s a racist comment because it assumes one has to have such and such skin color or such and such gender to be different. There’s an infinite number of characteristics that make us individuals, skin color and gender are just two.
- zxspectrum1982 4y ago
  I have organized devrooms at FOSDEM for almost 15 years. That thing about "lack of diversity" is bullshit, plain and simple. If women, or gays, or trans, or people with disabilities, don't submit talks, then they will not get talks accepted. And I'm not going to chase them begging them to submit talks or insert some talk just because they belong of a "minority". That would be unfair to the people that took the time and effort to actually submit a proper talk. Oh, by the way, I have no way of knowing whether someone is gay, trans, disabled or whatever because all I see is a 1-2 paragraph bio and a 2-3 paragraph proposal and title. Stop blaming yourself for being a white man.
  - spencerchubb 4y ago
    I would really prefer to be at a diverse conference. To make the conference experience as good as possible, maybe it would be wise to actively seek out diverse speakers if they are not applying.
    - guntherhermann 4y ago
      FOSDEM is a diverse conference, it's great. If you've never been, go and then criticise if you don't like it. Don't rely on second hand information to make up your mind.
    - zxspectrum1982 4y ago
      No, it wouldn't be. If those "diverse people" want to be at FOSDEM, they will need to follow the same rules everybody follows.
    - JuniorBalleg 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - spencerchubb 4y ago
        A reason why I dislike homogeneous environments is because I feel like the odd one out. If most people in a room are of the same demographic, and I don't fit that demographic, then I feel like an outsider. It is hard to interpret your question as sincere when you imply that people want diversity so they can pick up women.

the_mitsuhiko 4y ago

I quite enjoyed this conference mostly for how ridiculously packed it was. It was the first tech conference where I was that truly felt like pre-covid times. However it made it painfully obvious how incredibly non diverse the crowd and talks were. With many of the more commercial conferences I was it did not feel that way, probably mostly because of how much support personal was there to balance it out at least on the hallways and booths.

dom96 4y ago
It's a shame that it's still so packed even after COVID. The main thing that I disliked about FOSDEM when I was there in 2018/2019/2020 was the frustration of getting to a talk you are interested in and finding it's full from the previous talk. This happened for pretty much all talks I wished to attend. FOSDEM in some sense is a victim of its own success.

Tepix 4y ago

FOSDEM running out of room is not an easy problem to fix. They get the entire university campus for free, the conference is free and changing that would be the end of FOSDEM, unless perhaps a huge sponsorship pops up.

rsynnott 4y ago

> I understand that this is not an easy issue to tackle: FOSDEM has no entry tickets, but I am sure that most attendees would gladly fill out a quick interest check to help the organization tackle this issue. Hmm, I haven't been in a while, and maybe I'm misremembering, but my impression was that the issue wasn't that space was being poorly allocated, but that there just generally wasn't enough space.

wink 4y ago
Yes and no. For some topics they simply don't have the amount of huge rooms, but sometimes they've also been misreading the audience and had put something that had gotten a lot of traction the last months in a tiny dev room (I think Go was like that, many years ago). No blame here of course, it's run by volunteers and I think they're doing a stellar job. I'm also not sure if there would be any meaningful response "Yes, I plan to attend X Y Z dev rooms" - if only 10% fill that out, is that a good trend? Is 10% even realistic?
- kreetx 4y ago
  Nix was like this this year: the first events were all full with a long queue behind the door.

robert_foss 4y ago

FOSDEM is unique when it comes to conferences. Not only is it free, but a lot of open source projects are represented there both in terms of talks/booths/devrooms.

lucumo 4y ago

Every year I'm surprised at how badly maintained both ULB and Brussels as a whole is. Everything is filthy, vandalized and broken. Is it like that everywhere in Belgium? Or is just Brussels?

thiscatis 4y ago
Brussels in general for sure, there are nice areas but it's a decaying city with no real solutions. Having said that, it adds to the charm of universities and I guess you have older and newer campus buildings in every school.
radicalbyte 4y ago
It reminded me of the UK.
fignews 4y ago
Before FOSDEM I did some walking around Brussels and came across the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) campus which I'm not sure is connected to ULB but it seemed to be in even worse shape. I loved it because the campus felt a bit like a dystopian cyberpunk world. That being said I'm currently attending Cfgmgmtcamp in Ghent at the HoGent university campus and It's in a beautiful well maintained building. Maybe it's also slowly decaying :)
- ZiiS 4y ago
  VUB and ULB split in 1970 to be Dutch-speaking and French-speaking respectively.
mariusor 4y ago
I think the winter period has also a tendency to show the how gray Belgium really is. In the summer the ULB campus is much nicer in my opinion.
Tepix 4y ago
Maintaining stuff is not sexy. Look around. People prefer to tear things down and rebuild it or buy new stuff instead of repairing. This, and a lack of funding.

dtx1 4y ago

FOSDEM was great but our whole group got covid... Anyone else got it?

fignews 4y ago
Not yet. Not surprising though considering the insanely high density of people...
- dtx1 4y ago
  And a few rooms lacking any ventilation. The Golang Room was terrible in particular
kreetx 4y ago
What rooms did you go to? ;)
- dtx1 4y ago
  golang room mostly and the one with the talk about emulators on psp
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
It's only Tuesday! If you have it now surely you went there with it already.
- dtx1 4y ago
  Nope, 100% not because I live basically in Isolation and a lot of people in my party got it aswell.

ki_ 4y ago

> FOSDEM is dominated by a very telling lack of diversity No one cares about a persons gender or skin color. We care about the information that's being shared. Only racists and sexists care about the gender and skin color of the speakers.

exitb 4y ago
While I don't believe it's really FOSDEM's job to fix - after all speakers for a high profile conference don't appear out of nowhere, it's a fair question to ask - where are all the people different from us?
- ki_ 4y ago
  Well, there is nothing to fix. As long as the speakers are picked based on their content, everything is fine. But OP suggests we pick speakers based on their skin color... that's fucked up.
  - gabrielgio 4y ago
    Noone is saying that you should pick someone only based on the skin color. The idea is to bring people, that for some reason is being marginalized by the community in general, to speak. Like the person above mention "where are all the people different from us?". The world is composed roughly by 50% female? Why are not there 50% in CS as well?
    - ki_ 4y ago
      You cant balance it. In order to balance it, you already have to put these people into certain boxes, which is already pretty offensive. Then you'll have to descriminate against people in certain boxes in order to balance it. ITS WRONG. Stop grouping people up based on their skin color or sex or whatever. stop it.
      - gabrielgio 4y ago
        > ITS WRONG. Stop grouping people up based on their skin color or sex or whatever. stop it. You are assuming a lot there. I haven’t done and said none of it. I never advocated for quotas. > You cant balance it. You can’t indeed if you deny there may be a problem in the first place.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

The pandemic is still going on and there are zero mandates or restrictions. This means people that are at risk or more vulnerable can't attend these events safely. The collective response has been to shrug this off and cast these folks out of society. This should be no surprise that it leads to less diverse crowds. The only people that will go to in person events are those that are privileged enough to do so safely and have access to resources to treat illness if/when they catch it.

soupbowl 4y ago
White men are privileged enough to go conferences safely without getting sick. We should put a quota on them going to the events to make it more equitable for other races with weak immune systems.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  No we should make conferences accessible by offering virtual/streaming/hybrid, by focusing on ventilation (measuring CO2 in rooms and moving more air), limiting attendance in packed rooms, mandating vaccinations and boosters, mandating masks in public areas, etc. Basic stuff. Think of disabled people in wheelchairs. We don't say "well we better cut back on able bodied attendees to encourage more disabled"... we build f'in wheelchair ramps and accommodate them. Same thing for COVID and mitigating air spread disabling diseases should apply.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I’m in complete agreement with you, but I’ll note that FOSDEM fails even your weaker test: I personally witnessed someone in a wheelchair being unable to access a talk because the room’s entrance (a curved staircase) couldn’t accommodate their chair. ULB is certainly a fun campus to have FOSDEM on (and I don’t have any real alternatives, given its size and location), but accessibility already seems to be relatively low on the list of concerns.

wdroz 4y ago

> FOSDEM is dominated by a very telling lack of diversity. We could argue that this is a characteristic of the technology and CS world and that FOSDEM simply inherits it. However, it is 2023, and we should do better. Having roughly a 10% of female speakers 1 with not even a clear upwards trend is not representative of the industry anymore, and it is certainly not inviting for a conference that (I think) tries to be a safe space. This is tiring... FYI "There are fewer women in open source than in the ICT sector overall"[0] [0] -- https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/where-are-women-open-source https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...

woodruffw 4y ago

I’m disappointed by the fixation in these comments on the sole piece of constructive criticism in TFA: I was also at FOSDEM, and it’s easily the least diverse tech conference I go to, cybersecurity or otherwise. I don’t think the FOSDEM organizers or community are bigoted or particularly prejudiced. But that’s the entire point: you don’t need to be either of those things to maintain a status quo.

jancsika 4y ago

1. In the picture, it looks like there is a guy wearing a teal mask on the back of his neck. This is in an auditorium of 99% of people not wearing masks at all. If you're here on HN, guy-- what's up? I'm guessing pandemic fatigue. Then again, maybe that's not a mask at all, in which case... well, I'm guessing pandemic fatigue again, I suppose. :) 2. Did anyone here attend FOSDEM while wearing a (DIY) fit-tested N95 mask? If so, did you meet anyone else in attendance who was wearing a (DIY) fit-tested N95 mask?

woodruffw 4y ago
Not the OP, but I was there. I would say less than 5% of people were wearing masks, which was more than anywhere else I saw in Brussels. Of the people wearing masks, most were wearing form-fitting N95s or similar. I didn’t see any DIY masks.
zevv 4y ago
Very few people were wearing masks; I was on the bus from the city center to the venue, which was stuffed with people to the brim. The driver announced that wearing masks was recommended, though not mandatory. I was the only one wearing a mask.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > I was the only one wearing a mask. Was it a (DIY) fit-tested N95? :)

BonfaceKilz 4y ago

On diversity, just a minor thing I observed: Me (African country) and a colleague of mine (some Asian country) got our visas - for a short stay Schengen visa - denied despite being co-organizers and volunteers for one of the dev rooms. The commentary here is that it's difficult (and expensive) for minorities (non-US and non-European peoples) to get into Brussels, moreso with the refugee crisis. It sucks. I'm not entitled to getting a visa, but it would be nice if, like some folks, I could plan myself and just show up. But it is what it is.