Proposals for stands for FOSDEM 2026 are open.
If you have applied for a stand, please respond here. We know some of the FOSDEM organisers and will be happy to put in a word for you. They favour “joint submissions” (projects sharing a table) and we’d like to help Indian projects coordinate that as well.
Proposals for developer rooms and main track talks for FOSDEM 2026 are open.
Submission deadlines -
Devrooms - 12th October
Main track - 16th November
Note that FOSDEM provides travel support for main track speakers.
Correction - Devrooms run their own CFPs, the deadline mentioned above was for devroom proposals.
Key dates:
Thanks @Mz1 for pointing this out.
Update:
FOSS United + FLOSS/Fund had a stand at this FOSDEM. They had also invited and sponsored some open source projects from India to showcase at the stand - Ente, Zasper, Rethink DNS and Mecha.
Me and Laurens got to introduce Ente to lots of people enthusiastic about FOSS and taking control of their photos, gave away lots of merch, met lots of existing users and other cool folks!
People were surprised to hear that all these cool projects came out of India’s open source community, and they were even more surprised by the FLOSS/Fund program. One guy suggested putting a billboard in front of the university for the same 
It was an amazing experience overall, and it’d be great to continue showcasing new projects from India at FOSDEM and spreading the word about FOSS United and our initiatives.l
My experience at FOSDEM 2026:
FOSDEM has grown immensely since my last visit in 2017, but its core remains unchanged: it is the beating heart of open-source collaboration. This year was particularly special as I had the opportunity to reconnect with the community and discuss the future of high-performance Jupyter workflows.
A major highlight was meeting with a member of the Jupyter Steering Council. Our discussion regarding Zasper was incredibly encouraging. They suggested featuring Zasper on the official Jupyter blog and during an upcoming community call.
One remark from our meeting truly resonated: “Zasper could be at the center of Project Jupyter ecosystem.” We also explored the potential of running Jupyter clusters with Zasper to further enhance the ecosystem.
Beyond the Jupyter core, I connected with the organizer of the HPC, Big Data and Data Science devroom regarding the EESSI project. They expressed a strong interest in supporting Zasper alongside JupyterLab to provide the community with the faster, leaner Jupyter servers it needs.
I was also able to showcase FLOSS fund at the booths. It was a great experience interacting with the community.
Between these meetings, the GSoC meetup, and the GitHub Unconference, I walked away with fresh insights into current OSS trends and new strategies for community building. It’s an exciting time for open-source, and I’m looking forward to turning these conversations into code.
FOSS United partially sponsored 2 of the Rethink DNS + Firewall project members travel to FOSDEM to present the project to the Network devroom and represent FOSS United & FLOSS/fund at their first-ever Stand in Building K (thanks Ansh!).
As noted above, many attendees were surprised to see India-based projects represented the way they were.
It was great to connect with other project founders/members that our own projects rely on, like Weblate, OpenSSL, F-Droid, Kotlin Multi-Platform, Debian, Codeberg, Mozilla etc;
FOSS United and FLOSS/fund’s representation did benefit immensely as Nemo (with his vast experience, know-how, and impeccable communication) travelled along with the grantees. Otherwise, the Stand might have been at the risk of becoming an unrelated soapbox / market.
Aside from showcasing grantee projects, I’d urge FOSS United to encourage its India FOSS speakers to apply to present to various FOSDEM devrooms (the more the better!); and provide grants that’d cover their travel, if accepted (the more the better!). FOSS United can also offer, if it is within its expertise & bandwidth, help with talk submissions & preparation.
It is my opinion, FLOSS/fund might be better served if it had multiple folks visiting the devrooms and/or stands and spoke to the projects/maintainers present there. It seems that Saturday is particularly more busier & crowded than Sunday, though some of the popular devrooms (like the Linux Kernel, I believe) were scheduled for Sunday.