FOSDEM 2026

Join the FOSDEM Treasure Hunt!

2026-01-29T23:00:00Z

Are you ready for another challenge? We're excited to host the second yearly edition of our treasure hunt at FOSDEM! Participants must solve five sequential challenges to uncover the final answer.

Update: the treasure hunt has been successfully solved by multiple participants, and the main prizes have now been claimed. But the fun doesn’t stop here. If you still manage to find the correct final answer and go to Infodesk K, you will receive a small consolation prize as a reward for your effort. If you’re still looking for a challenge, the 2025 treasure hunt is still unsolved, so you are more than welcome to try that one instead. Thank you to everyone who participated, and congratulations to all who solved the challenge.

Teamwork is allowed and encouraged! So gather your friends and put your problem-solving skills to the test. Your task is to work through each challenge in order, solving the riddles to progress to the next step. No additional instructions will be given after this announcement; it’s up to you to navigate and decipher the clues on your own. To keep things fair, no hints or tips will be provided until the end of the first day, so participants will need to rely entirely on their ingenuity to move forward.

The first two individuals or teams to arrive at Infodesk K with the correct final answer will win a special FOSDEM prize! Prizes are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, and all answers must be validated by the staff member responsible for the treasure hunt before a winner is confirmed.

If the responsible staff member is not present at Infodesk K when you arrive, please wait and ask a FOSDEM staff member to contact them.

You can find the challenges near Infodesk K and H, or in this newspost. Good luck!

Guided sightseeing tours

2026-01-26T23:00:00Z

If your non-geek partner and/or kids are joining you to FOSDEM, they may be interested in spending some time exploring Brussels while you attend the conference.

Like previous years, FOSDEM is organising sightseeing tours.

Call for volunteers

2026-01-26T23:00:00Z

With FOSDEM just a few days away, it is time for us to enlist your help.

Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers make FOSDEM happen and make it a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially for heralding during the conference, during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch at the weekend, food will be provided.

Would you like to be part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick? Sign up here! You could really help us out with the following:

Loading the van on Thursday - Move all of our gear out of our storage and into the vans for transportation to the venue. Note that this task is not at ULB but in Kortenberg, see the details in the task description.
Build-up - Setting up the venue on Friday: this mostly involves carrying tables to their destinations and setting them up, putting up signage, covering the walls in brown paper... in short: transform the campus into a conference venue. We need as many volunteers as possible for this task.
InfoDesk - Be available at the InfoDesk during the weekend: help out fellow attendees with their questions, sell t-shirts etc. Proficiency in English is a must, but if you are proficient in other languages as well, it certainly wouldn't hurt.
Virtual InfoDesk - Want to volunteer, but cant be present at the ULB? We also have our InfoDesk on Matrix. Provide technical support for people watching streams, or pick up other questions about FOSDEM as they come in.
Heralding - Briefly introduce the speakers and the topics of their talks, make sure all talks end on time by giving speakers cues near the end of their time slot. Keep an eye out on room safety and report potential issues such as overcrowded rooms before it becomes more than a "potential" issue.
Video - Capturing and recording video. Ensure the livestreams to thousands are up and running and all talks are recorded.
Tear-down - (and cleanup) on Sunday evening: collecting beer bottles, tearing down the network, pulling brown paper off the walls, taking down the signage, stacking the rental tables in neat heaps, broom the floors etc. Basically, make sure we're welcome again next year.
Unpacking the van on Monday - All of our gear needs to come out of the vans and back into storage after the conference. Note that this task is not at ULB but in Kortenberg, see the details in the task description.
And many the many other tasks and ways to volunteer over the weekend.

For more information, please have a look at our volunteer documentation

If any or all of these sound like your kind of gig, pick your task(s) at our volunteer tool, subscribe to the volunteers mailing list and keep an eye on #volunteers:fosdem.org and #infodesk:fosdem.org on Matrix. Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!

Present a lightning lightning talk

2026-01-25T23:00:00Z

The same as last year: come and take part in a very rapid set of talks!

Thought of a last minute topic you want to share? Got your interesting talk rejected? Has something exciting happened in the last few weeks you want to talk about?

Get that talk submitted to Lightning Lightning Talks!

We have two sessions for participants to speak about subjects which are interesting, amusing, or just something the FOSDEM audience would appreciate:

Selected speakers line up and present in one continuous automated stream, with an SLO of 99% talk uptime.

To submit your talk for this session, make sure you meet some standards:

will be presented in less than or equal to 256 seconds (very strict time limit!)
slides created in .pdf format and attached to the submission as a resource
nothing too offensive
about something FOSDEM attendees would appreciate

Reviews will be done on a rolling basis until the evening before each session (so friday evening for the saturday session, saturday evening for the sunday session). There will be some priority given to entertaining and lighthearted talks (until we have too many and need something serious to balance them out).

To submit a talk, follow these steps:

Follow this link and press the “Submit a proposal” button
Select track “Lightning Talks”
Attach your slides as a .pdf as a resource
Wait for an acceptance notification, which will be sent out periodically as we get closer to the event
Confirm you’ll be able to attend the session
Await further instructions

Birds of a Feather/Unconference rooms

2026-01-12T23:00:00Z

As in previous years, some small rooms will be available for Unconference style “Birds of a Feather sessions”.

The concept is simple: Any project or community can reserve a timeslot (1 hour) during which they have the room just to themselves.

These rooms are intended for ad-hoc discussions, meet-ups or brainstorming sessions. They are not a replacement for a developer room and they are certainly not intended for talks.

To apply for a BOF session, enter your proposal at https://fosdem.org/submit. Select the BOF/Unconference track and mention in the Submission Notes your preferred timeslots and any times you are unavailable. Also mention if you expect a large audience (most rooms are 40, one has 80 persons).

Reservations can be made in advance or during the event itself subject to capacity.

Travel and transportation advisories

2026-01-10T23:00:00Z

Attendees should be aware of potential transportation disruptions in the days leading up to FOSDEM.

Rail travel

Railway unions have announced a strike notice from Sunday January 25th, 22:00 until Friday January 30th, 22:00. This may affect travel to Brussels for FOSDEM and related fringe events.

While there will be a guaranteed minimum service in place, train frequency may be significantly reduced. Also note that international connections might be affected as well.

Road travel

From Saturday January 31st (evening) until Sunday February 1st (noon), the E40 highway between Leuven and Brussels will be fully closed.

Traffic will be diverted via the Leuven–Brussels expressway.

Further details and links to official railway and traffic information sources are available on our transportation page.

FOSDEM Junior Registration

2026-01-09T23:00:00Z

We are pleased to announce the schedule for FOSDEM Junior. Registration for the individual workshops is required.

Links to the registration page can be found on the page of each activity. The full schedule can be viewed on the junior track schedule page.

/dev/random and lightning talks

2025-12-09T23:00:00Z

The room formerly known as “Lightning Talks” is now known as /dev/random.

After 25 years, we say goodbye to the old Lightning Talks format. In place, we have two new things!

/dev/random: 15 minute talks on a random, interesting, FOSS-related subject, just like the older Lightning Talks
New Lightning Talks: a highly condensed batch of 5 minute quick talks in the main auditorium on various FOSS-related subjects!

Last year we experimented with running a more spontaneous lightning talk format, with a submission deadline closer to the event and strict short time limits (under five minutes) for each speaker.

The experiment was a success, so we’re going to continue using this format in the upcoming FOSDEM edition and expand it slightly.

To avoid getting the existing lightning talk room mixed up with the new format lightning talks, we have renamed it to /dev/random. The format is still the same as in previous years, with 15 minute talks about various random but interesting subjects.

If you have something interesting you want to talk about which didn’t make it into one of the other devrooms, trim it down to 15 minutes and submit here!

To propose a /dev/random talk, go to https://fosdem.org/submit and select /dev/random as the track.

The deadline for /dev/random submissions is the 10th January, with accepted talks being notified around the 17th.

Keep an eye out for more details about taking part in the new lightning talks, but expect:

Around 5 minute time limit
Submissions opening closer to the event, and closing a day or two before
Slides submitted as .pdf as part of the proposal
Two sessions, one on each day

FOSDEM 2026 Accepted Stands

2025-11-15T23:00:00Z

With great pleasure we can announce that the following project will have a stand at FOSDEM 2026!

ASF Community
BSD + FreeBSD Project
Checkmk
CiviCRM
Cloud Native Computing Foundation + OpenInfra & the Linux Foundation: Building the Open Source Infrastructure Ecosystem
Codeberg and Forgejo
Computer networks with BIRD, KNOT and Turris
Debian
Delta Chat (Sunday)
Digital Public Goods
Dolibar ERP CRM + Odoo Community Association (OCA)
Dronecode Foundation + The Zephyr Project
Eclipse Foundation
F-Droid and /e/OS + OW2 FOSS community / Murena degooglized phones and suite
Fedora Project
Firefly Zero
Foreman
FOSS United + fundingjson (and FLOSS/fund)
FOSSASIA
Framework Computer
Free Android World: From Hardware to Apps – An Open, Sustainable Ecosystem (BlissLabs, IzzyOnDroid & SHIFTphone)
Free Software Foundation Europe
Furi Labs
Gentoo Linux
GitLab
GNOME
GNU Radio
Google Summer of Code
Grafana
Hex sticker booth by NLnet Foundation
Homebrew
Infostand on amateur radio
Internet Archive Europe (Saturday)
ISRG (Let’s Encrypt, Prossimo, Divvi Up)
Jenkins
Joplin
KAIYUANSHE (China Open Source Alliance)
KDE
KiCAD + FreeCAD
Kiwi TCMS (Saturday)
Kotlin Community Stand
LibreOffice
Linphone
Linux Foundation Europe + Open Source Security Foundation
Linux on Mobile
Luanti (formerly Minetest)
MapLibre
MariaDB Server
Mastodon
metal-stack
Mozilla
MySQL
Nextcloud
Nix and NixOS
Open Culture Foundation + Taiwan Open Source Community
Open Source at CERN
Open-Source Firmware Foundation
OpenAgri Software Services - democratising digital agriculture
OpenFlexure Microscope
openHAB
OpenMandriva
OpenNebula
OpenPrinting
OpenRemote
OpenSSL Foundation
openSUSE Project
OpenTofu & OpenBao (incl. Q&A)
Percona
PINE64 Community (Sunday)
PostgreSQL
postmarketOS
privacyIDEA
Proxmox VE
Python & Django
Qubes OS + Genode OS
RISC-V International
Rocky Linux
Software Freedom Conservancy
Software Heritage (Sunday)
SOGo Webmail
Sovereign Identity for server, desktop, and a cloud: Keycloak FreeIPA SSSD OpenWallet (Saturday)
Sovereign Tech Agency (Sunday)
T2 SDE Linux
The Matrix.org Foundation
the Perl & Raku Foundation - Battle Tested; Future Proof
Thunderbird
TinyGo, Mechanoid & WasmVision
Tor / Tails / NoScript
Ubuntu Community booth
VideoLAN
Weblate
Wireshark
wolfSSL
XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra
Xen Project
XMPP & Realtime Lounge

We will announce the location of every stand closer to the event.

FOSDEM 2026 Main Track Deadline Reminder

2025-11-13T23:00:00Z

Submit your proposal for the FOSDEM main track before it’s too late!

The deadline for main track submissions is earlier than it usually is (16th November, that’s in a couple of days!), so don’t be caught out.

For full details on submission information, look at the original call for participation.