FOSDEM 2011 - more opportunities
There are several ways to participate at FOSDEM in February 2011.
We are organizing talks in the Perl devroom on Sunday. See my previous post about the call for Perl related talks
The request for a Perl stand was submitted. Decision will be made around 14 December if it is accepted or not.
There is a track of 15 minute long talks at FOSDEM called "Lightning talks". They provide an opportunity to give a short talk about any project outside of the devrooms. I can even imagine that 3 people submit together one talk proposal and give 3 5-min talk in there. Just to show how it is done on Perl conferences. See the call for Lightning talks.
Other devroom If you have a solution to some problem, IMHO it is better to show it in a place where people dealing with that problem can be found and not where the people who use the same technology you used can be found. So if you wrote a OOP for Perl then of course the best place to show it is the Perl devroom. On the other hand if you have a solution to a problem related to, let's say, "Configuration/Systems Management" then it is probably better to show it in the "Configuration/Systems Management" devroom and not in the Perl devroom.
So I'd like to encourage everyone to check out the list of accepted devrooms and check out the call for presentations of the other devrooms as posted on the FOSDEM mailing list.
There is also going to be a Distribution miniconf during FOSDEM. This is an area where talks are about thing common to various Linux (and BSD) distributions. Last year I gave a talk about CPAN and how the "upstream" (CPAN developers) could better interact with the "downstream" - the Linux and BSD distributions. Details are here.
We are also planning to organize a Perl 6 and a Dancer hackathon either before or after FOSDEM. Further announcements will come soon.
In the Perl Ecosystem Group we already have some budget to finance the participation of a few people on FOSDEM. Therefore if you think about someone who would be a particularly good speaker at FOSDEM but who need some help in financing flight and accommodation, please let us know.