How become a speaker or to organize a stand

FOSDEM has a main track which is usually curated by organisers, but the 30-plus focussed developer rooms (devrooms)  each year are organised on a more bottom up basis. 

In October, potential organisers apply to run a devroom, and then once the final roster of devrooms is announced, they manage their own call for proposals, which are usually finalised and published in mid December.


What the schedule looks like:

The dates below are taken from the published call for participation for FOSDEM 2026:

  • 12 October: deadline for developer room proposals

  • 26 October: accepted developer rooms announced

  • 30 October (or earlier): developer rooms issue Calls for Participation

    • Devrooms start accepting applications around these dates.

  • 16 November: Deadline to submit main-track proposal

  • 1 December: Deadline to submit non-main-track proposal

  • 15 December (or earlier): developer rooms publish complete schedules

What this means if you want to speak

Broadly speaking, if you want to present to a room, if you are not applying to present a keynote or speak on the main track for a conference, you have the month of November to: 

  1. review all the announced devrooms

  2. decide which one(s) are the best fit for any talk you want to give

    1. The most relevant devrooms for CATs community are Energy and Performance

    2. The individual developer room organisers will issue their calls for participation in the next few days.

    3. Energy and Performance devrooms already published their call for participants:

      1. https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2025q4/003637.html

      2. https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2025q4/003692.html

  3. make a submission via form

You typically hear back in the second week of December, and most of the time, the organisers are responsive if you’re not sure your idea is a good fit for the room.

If you don’t want to present

FOSDEM also allows groups to run a stand at the conference for one or both days of the event, and to run BOF’s (Birds of a Feather meetings, for informal discussions on a predefined topic, or for a specific community).

Helping with a stand
If you want to run a stand for an open source project, you have til Nov 9th to apply. You can apply to run a stand for multiple open source projects, so if inside CAT there are multiple projects people work on, it’s possible to apply on behalf of CAT. Read more about applying for a stand.