Music Production devroom @ FOSDEM 2026

#1

Hi all,

I’m Lorenzo, and together with Steven Goodwin, I’m one of the managers of the newly formed “Music Production” devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM event in Brussels (and an avid Ardour user, as you can see from the tracks I usually post to the Made with Ardour subsection!).

I’m not sure how many of you are aware of FOSDEM or know what it is, but in a nutshell it’s the biggest event in Europe completely devoted to free and open source software: it’s completely free to attend, and it hosts dozens of devrooms dedicated to different topics over the course of two days, each with its own sessions, which means hundreds of presentations available to watch. Plus, there’s many stands from popupar open source projects scattered over the campus that hosts the event, and home to thousands of attendees every year.

Long story short, music had rarely seen any representation at FOSDEM (since I started 10 years ago, for sure). Whenever I had a music related topic I wanted to present, I always had to find a devroom that had some vague alignment to the topic, hoping my submission would not be seen as too out of scope. As such, I was really happy when they finally accepted our proposal to host a devroom purely devoted to Music Production as well. We’ll only have half a day on Sunday afternoon, but it’s a great start IMHO, and that might be plenty of time if we’ll have enough content and many interested attendees!

Which is why I’m writing on the list here too. As I’m writing, we still have one week to go for the Call for Proposals, which you can find here:

https://music.lminiero.it/fosdem/

If you have anything interesting you’d like to talk about during the session, please do consider submitting a talk! The official deadline is the 1st of December.

In general, I hope you’ll all consider attending the event. FOSDEM will take place on the 31st of January and the 1st of February, and as I was anticipating, our session should take place during the afternoon of the second day. Whether you’ve attended FOSDEM before or not, it’s an experience I always recommend to anyone who loves open source: if not to attend our session, to experience the event as a whole.

In case you have any question, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,

Lorenzo

9 Likes
#2

I’ve been going to FOSDEM nearly every year since about 2008! :smiley: A Music Production track is a great idea, I could definitely talk about how I use Ardour, rather than anything to do with its development…

1 Like
#3

@stephenharker that would definitely be an interesting talk, IMHO, especially considering there may be people that are completely new to how you can do music just using open source. It’s easy to get lost with all the available tools that exist, especially if you think of how many genres you can work with. As such, a talk that describes the typical flow, e.g., for working on a specific song from start to finish (just saying this in general, not implying it’s what you should do) is part of the info that I think could be very useful to an audience.

Looking forward to meet you there! (hoping the flu won’t kick me out as it did for FOSDEM 2025…)

2 Likes
#4

Hey all,

just a quick reminder that the deadline is coming soon (Monday), so if you had any ideas that you wanted to submit and haven’t submitted yet, this weekend is a good time to do so :grin:

Hope to see you soon in Brussels!

#5

I’m definitely going. As I’m a bit late I wonder if it’s still possible to submit a proposal?

#6

Hi Jeremy,

submissions are handled via a system called Pretalx by FOSDEM itself. Not
sure at what hour they close submissions, if they’re still open, but
officially the deadline is today. Looking forward to seeing you there
either way!

2 Likes
#7

I’ve entered a submission! See you there, looking forward to it!

#8

Oh no! I totally missed that deadline :confused: I hope to see you there anyway :slight_smile:

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#9

I live in Brussels and for years I’ve been meaning to try to put together a little informal get together for the FOSS music production community.
Would there be some interest for something like that ?
We actually have quite an important community in Brussels for FOSS audio but it’s mostly french speaking, though I’m sure a lot of folks would be delighted to connect with the broader international community.

I’m thinking just a jam with some beers on the Friday night but it could be anything really.

Would there be some interest for something like that ?

2 Likes
#10

I’m sure that people would appreciate an informal gathering of some sort! I’ll be in town Friday too, so unless I have different committments I’d definitely be happy to catch up with people who’ll attend the devroom. The only problem I see is that there’s no way to let people know about this: we can reach speakers via Pretalx, but not who might or might not attend the event, so it would need to be word of mouth, mostly. Otherwise, the best one could do is mentioning this on the FOSDEM mailing list, but not that many people follow it (I’m subscribed but rarely check, for instance).

#11

Yes, that would be cool! Arriving on Friday too.