Are you one of the people who has never installed Skype (and never will)? Do you feel a sense of frustration every time someone asks to call you with Skype? Does the excruciating inefficiency of maintaining multiple profiles across Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn give you more pain than the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard? Have you tried free and open source alternatives, but found their usefulness limited (or completely failed to get them working)? Would you like to see a way out of this nightmare?

This talk covers the depth and breadth of VoIP and all other real-time communications, encompassing desktop VoIP, instant messaging, social networking, microblogging, server solutions and also emerging areas like WebRTC, Peer-to-peer, privacy with FreedomBox and the mobile VoIP sector.

Despite this broad agenda, the presentations from each speaker have been tightly coordinated with a coherent focus on the challenges of making it all work together comprehensively and conveniently. The speakers have come together for FOSDEM with the goal of mapping out a strategy for free and open communications standards to finally take their rightful place as the dominant paradigm.

The speakers are the leaders in the flagship open source VoIP projects and will participate in a panel discussion and question/answer session in the telephony devroom immediately after the talk.