The OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project is a powerful open-source collaboration that provides a framework for creating custom embedded Linux distributions. It has become a key tool for developers building highly tailored, minimal, and efficient Linux systems across a wide range of devices, from IoT to automotive, robotics, and beyond.
Join us for this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session where OE/Yocto users, developers, and maintainers can gather to share their experiences, challenges, and best practices. Whether you’re a seasoned user or just starting to explore its capabilities, this session will provide an opportunity for lively discussion, collaboration, and networking.
Let’s gather designers, frontend developers and WordPress users interested in free/libre workflows for building modern websites. We’ll discuss static front-ends, no-code visual builders, headless CMS, and how tools like Silex can fit into this ecosystem. The goal is to share experiences, compare approaches and connect people who want a more sustainable, maintainable and libre way to build websites
Come discuss Bevy Engine !
Bevy is a thriving permissively-licensed open source game engine written in Rust. It focuses on modularity, performance and developer ergonomics, using a modern GPU-driven rendering architecture and an ECS-first approach to engine and game logic. Check it out at https://bevy.org/.
As an ice-breaker, we'll start with a short demonstration of a mobile game built with Bevy, followed by an open chat about its inner workings or any other topic about bevy, come if you're curious!
Digitization requires efficient software development. Today, this is no longer financially viable without the massive reuse of existing components and thus without the use of open source software as a generic product, also in the context of safety applications. Therefore, ways and means must be found to make open source software usable on a large scale for the railway sector. Due to the cooperative nature of open source software and the low competitive differentiation in the use of such generic products, the collaboration of various stakeholders from the sector under the governance of a Foundation can useful and important. This BOF wants to explore, if there is a critical mass to start a foundational backed project initiative for better spread of awareness for OSS in Railways and which activities exist to expand this approach for the safety-critical parts.
Join the Ariel OS community for an informal BoF session where maintainers, contributors, and anyone interested in hearing more about Ariel OS will be discussing the latest. - Feedback: What works for you and what does not. Where can we do better. - Roadmap: Where do we go from here - Challenges: Where do you see issues and challenges along the way.
This BOF will present the topics open for applicants in Horizon Europe Work Programme in relation to the Open Internet Stack successor programme to Next Generation Internet (NGI) for a total of 41.3M€. The agenda covers the results from the 2025 calls, the 3 new topics involved as well as Q/A and free interactions with Commission staff.
There is something between binary and quantum. Binary computing has reached the limits of scaling while Quantum computing needs a century more research to become practical available. Ternary computing is possible and exciting. We are enthusiastic on what we have done so far (motherboard, CPU in FGPA, communication via serial, an assembler, a deassembler, a compiler for a rust-like language, emulator, debugger and many plans.
Let's talk about ternary logic, gates, practical applications and what you'll need.
changing the world, -1 trit at a time
SURF is the IT cooperative of education and research in the Netherlands. SURF Research Cloud is one of SURF's services. Since 2020, we provide thousands of Researchers from all Dutch Institutes with powerful, easy to use infrastructure and tools. SURF Research Cloud is a portal that can serve resources from a variety of cloud providers. Our main cloud provider is our own private data center, running OpenStack. We have also provided resources of other European OpenStack clusters (Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden) and commercial clouds like AWS, Azure and Oracle. Our software will go Open Source. Get in contact with us if you are interested in the adventure.
Linux is being used more often in safety-critical areas like cars, planes, medical devices, robots, and trains. But each industry faces similar challenges when trying to meet safety and certification requirements. This BoF is an open discussion about those real-world problems: timing and determinism, documentation, certification, tooling, and system design. Anyone interested in safety-critical Linux is welcome to join, share experiences, ask questions, and explore where collaboration could help.
A meetup for people interested in FOSS solutions for processing the videos from the raw data captured by the camera sensors (in formats such as Magic Lantern Video, CinemaDNG, CanonRaw).
The NGI Zero consortium offers funding and support services to projects that help fix the internet through open software, open hardware and open standards. This gathering is a meet-and-greet for people who are part of, or interested in the NGI Zero ecosystem. Feel free to join! https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/
Free Software is a great way to share ideas, solutions and make the world a better place. We all know that already, but sometimes it is helpful to gather with like minded people in my own country, to drink something and have fun, while we think about how can we leverage free/open source for a better society.
This BoF is the place for gathering Portuguese and get to know each other. Also, a light overview about "Public Money? Public Code!" and "ANSOL - Associação Nacional para o Software Livre"
This Zabbix Community Meetup is an interactive session focused on open discussion, questions, and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Rather than formal presentations, the meetup encourages open dialogue around real-world use cases, challenges, and best practices when working with Zabbix. Participants are invited to share experiences, ask questions, exchange ideas, and connect with fellow community members in an informal setting, fostering collaboration and strengthening the Zabbix open-source community.
Labgrid is an embedded board control python library with a focus on testing, development and general automation. It includes a remote control layer to control boards connected to other hosts.
This BOF is a chance to meet up with developers and users to discuss anything related to Board Farms and labgrid.
Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices that create an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code.
There will be a Q&A session with members of the Reproducible builds team & community.
Meet and chat about open source in automotive !
This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at FOSDEM will focus on the growing intersection of open source and the automotive industry, highlighting the latest advancements, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration. As the automotive sector increasingly adopts open-source software, it is driving innovation in areas such as in-vehicle systems, autonomous driving, and vehicle connectivity. Key projects like Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) initiative are at the forefront of this transformation, providing open-source frameworks for developing scalable, secure, and reliable automotive software. This session will bring together developers, engineers, and enthusiasts to discuss how these initiatives are shaping the future of mobility and explore how open-source communities can work together to solve the unique challenges of the automotive domain.
Attendees will have the opportunity to share experiences, discuss key technical topics such as real-time operating systems, safety-critical systems, and compliance with automotive standards (e.g., ISO 26262), and explore potential new collaborations. The session will delve into the importance of open standards, the growing need for security in connected vehicles, and how projects like AGL and ELISA enable safer, more efficient automotive software development. By fostering cross-industry dialogue and strengthening the automotive open-source ecosystem, this session aims to inspire future collaborations that can help define the next generation of smart, connected, and autonomous vehicles.
A meet-up for the Hare programming language community to meet each other face to face, discuss our work, and plan for the future of the language.
https://harelang.org
The vulnerability management world is in a bit of turmoil. With the DoS-type attack AI slop is putting on Open Source projects at the same time as the funding of core systems is unsure, we need to agree on requirements for the future, ways of working and how we can handle the shift forced by the Cyber Resilience Act. Let's spend an hour talking about this and discuss ways forward.
The Global Vulnerability Intelligence Platform is a project that aims at working on a long term solution, a cooperation between OWASP, OpenSSF, Eclipse/ORCWG, OpenForum Europe and with support from the Sovereign Tech Resilience project.
https://www.gvip-project.org
A collaborative working session on mapping, triaging, and coordinating 2038-class rollover remediation across the open source ecosystem — where the real problem isn’t ancient systems, but invisible dependencies.
The 2038 problem isn’t waiting in retired Unix servers. It’s 32-bit time_t assumptions still being baked into modern libraries, protocol implementations, and embedded toolchains shipping today. Many 64-bit systems depend on components that simply cannot represent time beyond 2038 — asbestos in the walls, not a single leaky pipe.
This BoF runs a collaborative thought experiment: if your government demanded a credible 2038 exposure assessment in 12 weeks, where would you actually start? What tooling exists? What’s missing? How do findings at the repository level roll up into something actionable?
Distro maintainers, embedded developers, and infrastructure engineers are invited to share inventories, swap remediation strategies, identify high-impact targets, and surface coordination gaps. We’ll map the technical landscape and connect the people already working on the problem.
Bring your war stories — your known-knowns and your known-unknowns.
BoF dedicated to introduce newcomers on how to make their first contribution to GNOME.
Let's chat about Git, Mercurial, Pijul, Jujistu... what makes them great or not so great and what they're currently doing to improve. Present in the room will be two Mercurial developers, the creator of Pijul and other people invested in this space, feel free to come, ask questions and bounce ideas!
Dracut is an event driven initrd infrastructure. It is used as default initrd generator in many Linux distributions. Ubuntu and Debian will make it the default as well.
This is a BoF for all people interested in talking about Dracut. Come to this BoF in case you want to talk to the upstream/downstream maintainer(s) of Dracut in person.
What's going on in the Perl, CPAN, Raku and Raku.land communities and ecosystems?
Come, get to know some of the people, and learn (or share!) what's going on. We might have news from different Perl Mongers, upcoming events, CPAN Security Group, the Perl Foundation, the Raku Foundation, and more! It depends on who shows up.
And if you are new and unfamiliar with these communities, then come and ask questions! Lots of helpful people around.
Hope to see you there!
Arch Linux is a lightweight and flexible rolling release Linux distribution that focuses on simplicity, modernity, pragmatism, user centrality and versatility.
Members of the Arch Linux staff have historically always attended FOSDEM. This BoF session will give a status update on the distribution, adjacent projects and future plans.
There will be a short presentation followed by a Q&A session with Arch Linux distribution maintainers and project developers.
Join the Zephyr RTOS community for an informal BoF session where maintainers, contributiors, and and anyone interested in hearing more about Zephyr will be discussing:
Reticulum is a cryptographic mesh networking stack gaining attention for off-grid and emergency communications. The original Python implementation recently reached v1.0 but its maintainer has stepped back from public engagement, and the license prevents distribution in Debian, F-Droid, and major package managers.
This session brings together Reticulum users and developers to discuss practical migration paths. We will attempt live switching between implementations: Python Reticulum, RetiNet (AGPL fork), and the Rust rnsd daemon. Participants can bring laptops to test interoperability and identify friction points.
Discussion topics: current state of implementations (Python, Rust, C++ microReticulum, Go, Zig), community coordination without upstream, documentation gaps, embedded device support, and real-world deployment experiences.
Bring your RNodes, or laptops with Reticulum installed. No prior Reticulum experience required for observers.
Project: https://codeberg.org/lgh/Reticulum-rs/src/branch/daemon-mode Original Reticulum: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum RetiNet (AGPL fork): https://codeberg.org/skyguy/retinet
Lora Settings
[[interfaces]]
name = "FOSDEM LoRa"
type = "RNodeInterface"
interface_enabled = true
port = "/dev/ttyUSB0"
frequency = 864200000
bandwidth = 125000
txpower = 5
spreadingfactor = 10
codingrate = 6
Are you building something cool with a friendly functional programming language? Bring your projects for a laid-back show and tell session! We'll look at real-world code in languages like Gleam, OCaml, Elm, Kotlin, and other functional languages that emphasize type safety without unnecessary complexity.
Share a piece of code you're proud of, a thorny problem you solved elegantly, or simply come to see how others are using functional programming to build practical things. We'll explore patterns that work well across different languages and discuss how type systems and functional features help us write more reliable software.
Whether you're a functional programming enthusiast or just curious about these languages, join us for an interactive session focused on real projects and practical experiences. No deep theory required - just genuine examples and friendly discussion about building things that work.
This is a participatory session - if you have a project to share, great! If not, come with your questions and curiosity. We're happy to meet you!
Special-Purpose Operating Systems are purpose-built Linux distributions for fufilling one specific function. We are a collaborative initiative, bringing together developers, maintainers, and adopters focused on operating systems designed for specific workloads—cloud-native, edge, embedded systems.
In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we aim to connect in person for the third time at FOSDEM, a pivotal event for the open-source operating system community. This meetup will provide a space for SPOS enthusiasts, contributors, and representatives from major Linux distributions to exchange insights, share experiences, and discuss the future direction of specialized operating systems.
Localization of free software is essential, yet often left in an unwell condition even in significant projects used by many. But it's what makes software truly yours! Come and share your experience with the localization process of your projects. Leave inspired. Let's chat about what you find important in localization, what makes you happy, and what complicates it for you. What do you want the best libre localization to have and provide to its users?
A space for the localization community where every hacker can share their experience and make FOSS localization better, not only confident speakers with selected talks.
Like each year, every person interested in localization is welcome! The Weblate team will be there. We will be gathering feedback, discussing collaboration within the community, Weblate plans, features, bugs, and more.
A space for DevOpsDays and Cloud Native Days conference organizers to share experiences, swap tips and connect with peers building community events.
Whether you're experienced or just curious about getting involved, this BoF is a space to connect, collaborate, and support each other.
The common thread is working on building building locally rooted conferences, meeting each other and sharing experiences.
Showing what's possible with the E-Paper driver board from Modos. Including custom wood frame E-Paper 13 inch displays with 40 hz and color. Macbook M1 16 inch with an E-Paper screen. I will bring my hardware for you to test so you can try it out.
Join us for the NetworkManager meetup at FOSDEM 2026 to share your ideas, provide feedback or simply meet other users. There is no fixed agenda, so please bring your own topics.
https://networkmanager.dev/
In this BoF teams from PenPot and KDE will come together to review:
Passbolt is an open source credential manager designed for collaboration. This Birds of a Feather session is an opportunity for the Passbolt community to come together in person to openly discuss the future of the project. This BOF is designed as an informal, interactive discussion.
The session will focus on three main goals: - Collecting feedback on existing features, workflows, and pain points - Shaping and discussing the Passbolt 2026 roadmap with end users - Creating direct space for technical questions with maintainers
Format - Short intro and framing from moderators - Open floor discussion guided by community questions - Notes and key takeaways will be collected to inform future roadmap work
I used to write a lot of open source CUDA 5-10 years ago. Now that NVIDIA lost interest in us poor consumer plebs, my software has a more expensive entry barrier. That is why I write WebGPU these days, the same code can melt my laptop and my phone. Its great. Come and lets burn some chips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU
VideoLAN https://www.videolan.org/ tech meeting for VLC.
We will speak about the upcoming VLC 4.0 milestone.
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.
Since we don't have a booth this year, we want to take the opportunity for a more focused discussion about all the things you miss in Haiku, as a user or as a developer, to enjoy using it.
Hardware support, features, documentation, accessibility (there's a lot to do there too)… What's missing for Haiku as a daily driver to you?
We had so munch fun at last year's BOF that we're back for more!
Come hang with us to talk about Hachyderm, hear stories about running one of the larger Mastodon sites, learn more about of infra, talk trust & safety, and hear what's going on with the Nivenly Foundation.
We'll have several current maintainers on hand. All are welcome!
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Hachyderm (https://hachyderm.io) is a curated network of tech industry professionals from around the globe, focused on building a respectful community. We're a safe space for LGBTQIA+ folks, we support Black Lives Matter, and we welcome anyone who follows the rules and needs a home or fresh start.
We're hackers, professionals, enthusiasts, and we're passionate about life, respect, and digital freedom. We believe in peace and balance.
--
The Nivenly Foundation (https://nivenly.org) is a democratically run nonprofit on a mission to bring sustainable governance and autonomy to open source projects and communities around the globe, founded on the principle that project maintainers should share in their projects’ success.
Are you interested in talking about how to build sustainable businesses around open source projects without sacrificing the ideals of the free open source movement? The non-profit association behind Open Source Founders Summit wants to invite those with an interest in financing open source projects with services, support and/or associated commercial products to join us! We'll talk about how to balance developing the project versus developing the commercial offering, go to market motions, product strategy, and more.
:TupperTerm is inspired by :TupperVim and the idea is simple: we come together and discuss our terminal workflows.
Show off your dotfiles, favorite CLIs, the TUIs you use. (if you have never heard of fzf maybe now is a good time to try it out) Maybe you're a big time Neovim user or maybe you're more of an helix person or Emacs.
Ever heard of tmux or zellij? Maybe you don't like terminal multiplexers.
The idea of TupperTerm is to exchange about all these things.
Get help in understanding and setting up CVMFS, a highly scalable network filesystem.
The session is initiated by a contributor to CVMFS. Core maintainers of CVMFS may be joining us.
Developers and adopters of other Software Defined Storage technologies are also welcome to join and lead their discussions.
With internet shutdowns, censorship, and fragile infrastructure becoming a fact of life, communities need communications that keep working. Reticulum is a practical, open networking stack for resilient, decentralised communication across very different links, from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to LoRa and packet radio.
Project: https://reticulum.community/
This BoF brings together people building with Reticulum (and those curious about it) to share what's working and align on what comes next. Reticulum is at an inflection point: as the original lead developer steps back from public coordination, this is our moment to turn Reticulum into a community-run project that can realise it’s potential as an alternative communication system.
This is a discussion-led working session with people actively deploying and experimenting, including:
We'll focus on: agreeing priorities for the next 3-12 months, defining a lightweight coordination model (triage/reviews/releases) and turning interoperability learnings into a shared protocol spec scope and an initial conformance/test-vector plan that enables independent implementations.
Outcome: leave with a short set of priorities, named owners for follow-ups, an agreed spec/outline and test-vector plan and a scheduled next check-in.
As data rates continue to rise and electrical interconnects approach their physical limits, somehow interest in optical (photonic) technologies is gaining momentum. This BoF session will explore how community collaboration of software and hardware developers, hobbyists, physicists, engineers etc can contribute to next-generation optics (photonics) tools. We will discuss the current ecosystem of optical (photonic) tools, how newcomers can get started, the key challenges, and whether there is momentum to propse a dedicated devroom next year.
Events in the Fediverse are gaining momentum. As an appendix to the Social Web track on Saturday, this BoF offers an open discussion space to shape the future of federated event publishing and calendars.
Several free and open-source projects in this area are already collaborating across the Fediverse. An in-person meeting creates space to deepen that cooperation, welcome users, operators, developers, and all interested participants, and to build trust between communities and projects. Together, we aim to refine shared goals, discuss challenges, and explore how social and technical aspects of federation come together to support a healthy, interoperable open social web for event management and calendars.
https://event-federation.eu https://gancio.org https://lauti.org https://mobilizon.org https://bonfirenetworks.org
The FOSS Community in India has been growing over the last decade[0]. This BoF is to discuss how to grow and nurture it further. The organizers are the folks behind the FOSS United + FLOSS/fund booth, and we'd love to talk about what's happening in the space (including the amazing IndiaFOSS conference).
[0]: > India alone added more than 5 million developers on GitHub this year (over 14% of all new accounts) and is on track to account for one in every three new developers on GitHub by 2030.
TRANS*FEMINIST SERVER SESSION - a shellscript session to update and configure our feminist networks, meet each other, find solidarities and alliances in computing.
As a daemon we want to learn about switch mode in tinc or vpn software to use wake up on lan (WOL) to switch on our backup server.
NLnet foundation offers financial support to free and open source technologies. Everybody is welcome to drop by this Birds of a Feather meetup. If you have questions about funding possibilities, are a grantee with ideas or remarks, or just want to come by and say hi. Many of the NLnet team will be there and we are looking forward to meet you. https://nlnet.nl/
Sailfish OS has been providing daily-usable Linux on phones for over a decade, with its unique blend of gesture-based mobile interface, Android AppSupport and enthusiastic community. Join the Sailfish OS Community Birds of a Feather event to talk about Sailfish OS, meet the Sailfish community, share experiences and ask questions.
The Jolla Team will be present to answer your questions and share insights about future developments.
The Sailfish OS BoF has been running for many years at FOSDEM and always attracts an enthusiastic community. We look forward to seeing you there!
Learn the essential skills of Chinese calligraphy and chopsticks in a fun, hands-on session! Start by creating your own Spring Festival couplets, mastering the brush and forming meaningful characters. Then, switch to chopsticks as you practice savoring dim sum, noodles, rice, beans, and tofu with precision and ease.
Along the way, you’ll also explore Taiwan’s vibrant open-source communities, discover exciting conferences, and pick up insider tips for sightseeing around the island. Whether you’re a beginner or a cultural explorer, this session promises a unique, immersive, and enriching experience!
The paradigm we have been using for decades is HCI (Human Computer Interaction) it talks about the computer as the interface. We already know this is broken and not compatible with the enshittified data world we live in now. HDI (Human Data Interaction) provides a better methodology and should be applied by designers, policy makers and developers. Lets learn and discuss together...
Join us in the SlimeVR BoF room after our presentation! https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/TBFSCP-slimevr/ Please feel free to come say hi, ask us questions or just to hang out with us! For those that don't know us yet: SlimeVR is a fully open-source hardware and software company specializing in Virtual Reality full body tracking solutions.
Let’s discuss open source environmental sensing and operational open source monitoring platforms for ecosystem restoration, resource sustainability, and pollution. We can look at some open source examples in groundwater flow monitoring, greenhouse gas emissions, and reforestation.
Low cost environmental monitoring is needed to ensure paths forward for sustainable ecosystems and life ways through ever-increasing industrial utilization of the earth system. However, proprietary and high cost solutions limit access to and deployment of monitoring systems, slowing community responses and restoration engineering. Operational open source environmental platforms facilitate community driven initiates to meet these needs long term.
Come and chat with a GIMP developer about the current and future state of GIMP. Share your experiences, art created with GIMP and just have a nice time meeting each other. Also get a GIMP sticker!
In this Birds of a Feather session, members of the OpenStack Community will have the opportunity to get together to discussion issues ranging from development to operations. It is also a goal of this session to welcome potential contributors and users who might want to learn more about the project and how they can get involved.
The OpenStack project is part of the OpenInfra Foundation. Code for the project is hosted at opendev.org
Welcome to the Official FOSDEM Tor Relay Operator Meetup. This BOF is for current or up-and-coming Tor Relay or Bridge operators interested in meeting like-minded people for an hour-long session with the Tor community. We start with a quick update from the official Tor Project, followed by a longer discussion/Q&A to explore what is happening in our community right now.
We have no agenda for the meeting, so that everybody can bring up questions or topics related to the Tor ecosystem here.
This session brings together TiDB community members to share the latest updates on the TiDB project and the community. There will also be an open Q&A, giving attendees an opportunity to ask questions, and provide feedback directly to the TiDB team and community members.
Meet and chat what's currently going on. How to solve problems with WoodpeckerCI. Get new ideas and feedback.
Just chat :)
Let's see if we can exchange some ideas and/or collaborate together on open source real time video mixing! Represented / present should be some of the people behind https://github.com/FOSDEM/video-fazantix and https://github.com/ddvtech/mistserver and perhaps more!
AI alignment is the effort to design Artificial Intelligence systems so their goals, behaviors, and decisions are consistent with human values and intentions, making them safe, helpful, and reliable. In the context of open source, this BoF will explore what it means for AI to be aligned with open source (what we have built, know, value, expect). Insights will inform work we're doing in the CHAOSS Community as part of AI in Open Source Working Group
Spend some time with members of the Community team at Mozilla along with Mozilla Contributors. This is a great opportunity to learn about contribution opportunities across all Mozilla—for both developers and non-developers (user support, localization, documentation, ideas and product feedback). Newcomers are welcome (encouraged!) to ask questions and for old timers to have a casual chat with other contributors about their works; or help newcomers to get started. We'll also brainstorm on ways for the community to get more involved moving forward. Hope to see ya there!
The Free Software Foundation Europe's "Software Freedom Podcast" is at FOSDEM and doing an on sight recording! You can join us and be part of the upcoming SFP episode. For this episode we will talk with Dr. Lucas Lasota from the Just Transition Center of the Martin Luther University of Halle Wittenberg, about, "can the Digital Markets Act (DMA) help to protect Free Software developers working with AOSP?".
We are happy to welcome everybody interested in the topic to the recording of the Software Freedom Podcast!
In the competition with Microsoft 365, FOSS solutions suffer from an architectural limitation : a simple SSO does not create a platform...
To offer a true Smart Platform Experience around the mail, we must go beyond silos solutions and build deep, consistent, cross-functional integration between independent services.
The aim of this BOF room is to foster discussions & ideas to see what could be such a "standard" : both the technical and governance subjects will be discussed.
It is the extension of the conference : Open Buro: Integrating applications to create a Smart Platform Experience
Based on the integration of DINUM's LaSuite into Twake.AI, we will analyze what is missing to offer a “Smart Platform Experience”: a standardized cross-functional layer that brings together independent services.
Samuel Paccoud, director of lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr, will comment this integration and the perspectives he identifies.
We will see how such a standard can enable a modular ecosystem, where each application remains independent but can interoperate deeply, forming a credible and sustainable sovereign workplace. This is the mission of the Open Buro consortium: to create an open foundation where architecture becomes a political act.
AI doesn’t have to slop. OpenMates is aiming to not just be an open source AI agents web app, but an alternative to big tech AI platforms with both better usability, functionality, ethics, user interests first, privacy and provider independence. Focused on everyday users and everyday tasks, without requiring deep technical knowledge. While also being an awesome software, API and CLI to use for every developer. OpenMates can not only answer questions but use various apps to fulfill tasks, can consider personal infos if the user explicitly chooses that (while still focusing on data minimization and maximum user privacy), and has a general focus on educating and inspiring users. And this is only the early beginning.
After over a year of work and over 3000 commits, OpenMates is currently available in an alpha version as both a fully featured self hosting edition on GitHub & on OpenMates.org for those who don’t want to self host. Web app and REST API are usable, CLI is planned. OpenMates currently uses various existing APIs / LLM providers, and support for offline models via Ollama, LM Studio, etc. is planned for the months ahead.
Join the development meetup to learn more about OpenMates, shape its future and contribute.
Open source can be legally open yet practically closed.
We can all read the code and reuse the licence. But who gets heard, who gets funded, who sets direction, and who feels welcome? This is still shaped by time zones, language, access to money and mentoring, and project governance.
This BoF is a structured, friendly discussion for maintainers, contributors, newcomers, community folks, designers, docs writers, translators, researchers, event organisers, and anyone affected by open-source decisions (even if you've never opened a PR).
We'll map the points where openness breaks, share approaches that have worked, and leave with 2-3 concrete actions we can try in the next few months: small, testable steps that make participation wider and influence more fairly distributed.