FOSDEM

FOSDEM is a free event for open source software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Local First

Local-First is a new paradigm for developing decentralized applications and software, following the motto "You own your data, in spite of the cloud". In the last years, it gained increasing adoption among programmers for its interesting properties: real-time collaboration that can also go offline temporarily and will then sync and merge without conflicts; data ownership for users, as all data is available on their devices; getting rid of cloud services and surveillance capitalism; increased security, resilience and privacy; and more.

Old challenges

In the context of a much needed digital sovereignty in Europe, and elsewhere in the world, Free and Open Source collaborative and decentralized solutions are in strong demand. We believe that Local-First is a good answer to many of those challenges.

New solutions

Multiple frameworks, sync protocols, P2P protocols, sync engines, libraries for Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), collaborative editors and apps, are coming to life and the developer experience is getting better by the day. We also feel the need, as members of those communities, to gather forces, exchange, and cooperate on various subjects. This devroom is also an opportunity for all developers curious and interested in Local-First, to learn more about the topic and the progress recently made.

Submission process

Please submit your proposal at https://fosdem.org/submit before Friday December 5th, 2025 at midnight CET.

Warning: The FOSDEM Pretalx homepage states that the deadline is 2025-11-16 but this only applies to the main track. For devrooms, the deadline is later, and specially for our devroom, the deadline is 5th of December. When submitting your proposal, make sure you choose the “Local First, Sync engine, CRDTs” entry in the track drop-down menu, otherwise, your proposal might go unnoticed. Don't hesitate to include an estimate of the time needed for your talk in the speaker notes (maximum 30min). We will try to accommodate equivalent time slots for everyone, with also some room for Q&A, unless you state otherwise. If we receive too many high quality proposals, time slots might be shortened.

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software and Open Research. We encourage you to submit your proposal as early as possible, so we have enough time to review it as it deserves. Before submitting a proposal, please make sure that you will be able to attend FOSDEM and deliver your presentation in person. The conference does not accept remote presentations. We are not able to offer travel funding for prospective speakers, but entrance is free for everyone. Between the 12th and the 15th of December, if your proposal is selected, you will have to enter in the pretalx interface and validate your participation; this is important. Once the schedule of the devroom is finalized, we will contact you and share more technical details with you so you can prepare your talk successfully.

Important dates

• Dec. 5th, 2025: CfP submission deadline
• Dec. 12th, 2025 or earlier: notification of acceptance
• Dec. 15th, 2025: announcement of final schedule on FOSDEM website
• Jan. 31st, 2026: devroom day, from 15:00 to 19:00

Recordings

As always at FOSDEM, the talks and Q/A sessions will be recorded. The recordings will be published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). By agreeing to present at FOSDEM, you automatically give permission to be recorded.

Code of Conduct

Following the release of the updated code of conduct for FOSDEM, we'd like to remind all speakers and attendees that all of the presentations and discussions in our devroom are held under the guidelines set in the CoC and we expect attendees, speakers, and volunteers to follow the CoC at all times.