We had a hard time picking panels this time. We have exactly two panel slots. Apart from the main track talks+panels, we have 6 devrooms. It’s a well kept secret for now that 50% of all the conference sessions are in devrooms. Selecting panels was majorly a task of balancing the conference. We also spent a lot of time trying to fit the proposals here into other parts of the conference (more on this in just a bit) - which in part accounts for the delay in this announcement. The conference committee would like to thank all the panel proposers again!
After a lot of discussion, we have picked one panel from all these submissions:
OSS health and sustainability in 2025 by @ansh .
I’ve personally watched from the sidelines the the fantastic work Ansh has put in in this area - including his excellent outreach to various niche projects for floss.fund. This is an area where the conference is trying to put adequate emphasis on, so we picked this up after a lot of deliberation. We believe this nicely complements and takes forward the conversations from the pre-event Maintainer’s summit, and the other talk we have in the conference main track - Open Source is a Gift Economy.
Among the panel submissions, we have also picked up ‘Pursuing a Policy Career in FOSS’ by @Tarunima as a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. Please see the BoF selection announcement here.
The other panel that we have selected is not a submitted panel. It is a curated invited panel. If you look at the conference schedule, one thing that will stand out is what we don’t have much of… AI ! A lot of behind the scenes work went into making a panel to discuss something we should all be talking about - real, libre AI. No not open weight models. The real deal. The “Libre AI Panel” will have conversations around this topic, moderated by @rahulporuri . The panelists for this are going to be:
- Ashita Prasad, Developer Advocate, AWS
- Kurian Benoy, ML Engineer, Sarvam AI (participating in an independent capacity and not as a representative of Sarvam AI), creator of “whisper normalizer” and volunteer Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
- Rakesh Dubbudu, Founder & CEO, Factly Media, helped the Telangana Govt. formulate the Open Data Policy
- Tarunima Prabhakar, Co-founder, Tattle
With this the conference schedule is close to complete. There are still some minor changes happening in devrooms; we’re hopeful the complete frozen schedule will be up soon.