FOSDEM 2019 - Distributions Devroom Call for Participation

[Brian Exelbierd]

The Distributions devroom will take place Sunday 3 February 2019 at
FOSDEM, in Brussels, Belgium at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

As more and more workloads are being considered for containerization in
the future and are finally landing in virtualized environments today,
distributions remain a critical success factor and are more important
than ever. Containers, like virtual machines, are not magical and
rely on piles of software being assembled in a way that is repeatable,
reliable, and functional. This is at the very heart of the problem that
distributions have always solved.

Each distribution is responsible for building, testing, and releasing
software as well as managing the lifecycle of each application in the
collection. Additionally, distributions do very important work in ensuring
that various versions of upstream software work well together and can
co-exist. Distributions are also, often responsible, for "de-vendoring"
upstream software so that security fixes can be applied more quickly.

We welcome submissions targeted at contributors interested in issues
unique to distributions, especially in the following topics:

# Topics and Areas of Focus

## Focus Areas

- The ways that distribution technologies can be leveraged to allow
  for easier creation of a multi-verse of artifacts from single source
  trees. This includes the increasing move toward self-contained
  applications and providing multiple non-parallel installed versions
  of software.

- Efforts being made in shared environments around Build/Test/Release
  cycles.

- Topics related to the delivery problem as it impacts updates in
  terms of both size and rollback/reliability are expected to be featured.

## Additional Topic Ideas

- Distribution and Community collaborations, eg: how does code flow from
  developers to end users across communities, ensuring trust and code
  audibility

- Automating building software for redistribution to minimize human
  involvement, eg: bots that branch and build software, bots that
  participate as team members extending human involvement

- Cross-distribution collaboration on common issues, eg: content
  distribution, infrastructure, and documentation

- Growing distribution communities, eg: onboarding new users, helping
  new contributors learn community values and technology,  increasing
  contributor technical skills, recognizing and rewarding contribution

- Principals of Rolling Releases, Long Term Supported Releases (LTS),
  Feature gated releases, and calendar releases

- Distribution construction, installation, deployment, packaging and
  content management

- Balancing new code and active upstreams verus security updates, back
  porting and minimization of user breaking changes

- Delivering architecture independent software universally across
  architectures within the confines of distribution systems

- Effectively communicating the difference in experience across
  architectures for developers, packagers, and users

- Working with vendors and including them in the community

- The future of distributions, emerging trends and evolving user demands
  from the idea of a platform

Ideal submissions are actionable and opinionated. Submissions may
be in the form of 25 or 50 minute talks, panel sessions, round-table
discussions, or Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

Dates
------
Submission Deadline: 02-Dec-2018 @ 2359 GMT
Acceptance Notification: 7-Dec-2018
Final Schedule Posted: 14-Dec-2018

How to submit
--------------
Visit https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM19

1.) If you do not have an account, create one here
2.) Click 'Create Event'
3.) Enter your presentation details
4.) Be sure to select the Distributions Devroom track!
5.) Submit

What to include
---------------
- The title of your submission
- A 1-paragraph Abstract
- A longer description including the benefit of your talk to your target
  audience, including a definition of your target audience.
- Approximate length / type of submission (talk, BoF, ...)
- Links to related websites/blogs/talk material (if any)

Administrative Notes
----------------
We will be live-streaming and recording the Distributions Devroom.
Presenting at FOSDEM implies permission to record your session and
distribute the recording afterwards. All videos will be made available
under the standard FOSDEM content license (CC-BY).

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the
devroom organizers: distributions-devroom at lists.fosdem.org
(https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/distributions-devroom)

Cheers!

Brian Exelbierd (twitter: @bexelbie) and Brian Stinson (twitter:
@bstinsonmhk) for and on behalf of The Distributions Devroom Program
Committee