Invited Talk Intermediate

FOSDEM - what it is, why we do it, and how

Approved

Session Description

FOSDEM is the largest Open Source conference on Earth, with the most talks and tracks by far. At 8,000+ it is also one of the largest ones by attendee size. And it's the largest one, by far, which is completely non-commercial and for the benefit of the community. For 25 years in a row, by now.

Let's talk through what FOSDEM is, how we make it work, and what you can copy.

Key Takeaways

Learn how to organize a non-commercial, for-community FOSS conference.

References

https://fosdem.org/

Session Categories

Community

Which track are you applying for?

Main track

Speakers

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann

Senior Developer Programs Director | Grafana Labs

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Senior Developer Programs Director, a member of the Office of the CTO and a member of the OSPO of Grafana Labs. He is also Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, and more. Among others, he was a CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, a CNCF Governing Board member, the chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Observability, and other roles. He's the only one to receive the CNCF's "Chop wood, carry water" award for essential background twice. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including but not limited to KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress.

In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch.

Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Mastodon at https://chaos.social/@RichiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.

Reviews

[discussed and approved as invited talk] Richard “RichiH” Hartmann is going to attend IndiaFOSS 2025. RichiH is the Senior Developer Programs Director and a member of the Office of the CTO and OSPO at Grafana Labs. He is a Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, and much more. He’s also renowned for organizing and running some of the largest tech conferences worldwide, including KubeCon, PromCon, DENOG, DebConf, Chaos Communication Congress, and especially FOSDEM. I think a talk on FOSDEM will be extremely relevant. FOSDEM is not only the largest open source conference by the number of talks and tracks, but it’s also fully community-run and non-commercial, now running for 25 consecutive years with over 8,000 attendees annually. Richard’s experience in running FOSDEM and other large-scale events could provide invaluable lessons for the local ecosystem here, especially as we grow our own events and communities.

Reviewer #1 Approved