FOSS Backstage is an open platform and we thrive on your contributions. Together with our dedicated program committee we want to shape a program that truly is “by the community for the community”. Therefore we are looking forward to your input.

We are interested in talks on Open Source project leadership best practices, community management, Open Source project metrics, Open Source strategy for enterprise, adopting Open Source collaboration in corporations (Inner Source), and legal matters when dealing with Open Source.

To give you an idea of the types of talks we are looking for we have created the tracks listed below:

Governance & Community
Sustainability &
Funding Legal & Compliance
Diversity & Inclusion
Growing Open Source

Some question that you might want to discuss in your proposals are:

How can people, who are scattered around the world work together on projects best?
Why is it important to convince people, businesses, cities or even states to use and develop Free and Open Source Software?
How can I sustain my FOSS project?
What Open Source business models are there?
How to best grow and maintain your open source communities and allies?
How to manage your relationship to those stakeholders and what role do OSPOs have in this?
What is the role of design in good open source projects?

Related topics not explicitly listed above are of course welcome as well. We do not, however, accept product presentations or company marketing pitches. If you are seeking to market your company at FOSS Backstage, we’ll be delighted to send you our sponsoring prospectus and discuss all the great benefits that it entails. Please reach out to Paul at partner@foss-backstage.de to learn more.

How to submit a session

This year we will be using the open source tool Pretalx. There you can chose the format of talk you prefer, share an abstract for your proposal, tell us if you would prefer to present on the online or the in-person date, and list co-speakers you have. Once you have shared your contact address we will send you, and any co-speakers you have listed, confirmation that we have received your proposal.

Dates & Procedures

The Call for Participation closes on November, 15th (23:59 CET). All submissions will be reviewed blindly meaning that the program committee is unable to see the submitter. Only the talk and the describing abstract is rated in order to reduce unconscious bias. After all talks are rated, we will inform you about the status of your submission starting in December. The conference will take place March 17th and 18th 2022, with the online day on the 17th and the in-person day on the 18th.

tl;dr

We are looking for talks, discussions, workshops, lightning talks, etc on all topics governance, collaboration, legal and economics within the scope of FOSS. The CfP closes on November, 15th (23:59 CET). Your submissions will go through a blind review by our program committee. We will inform you about the status of your session starting in December.

In case you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Paul or Alexander at info@foss-backstage.de