freenode #live 2018 takes place on Saturday 3 November 2018 and Sunday 4 November 2018. The CFP closes on Sunday 31 July 2018, speakers may be accepted and announced on a rolling basis. The submission deadline for presentation slides is Sunday 21 October 2018

Audience

The audience at freenode #live is very diverse, spanning attendees from a wide range of Free and Open Source Software and other peer-directed projects. The inaugural freenode #live conference in 2017 saw upwards of 250 attendees. Attendee backgrounds ranged from development, quality engineering, operations, technical management and developer relations.

The audience is technical, and we want to you keep in mind that you will be talking to your own communities, give a talk that you would enjoy attending yourself. Please do talk about how awesome your project is but limit the amount of marketing material you include in your talk. We’d love for your content to be inclusive and ask that you be mindful of the audience and that you comply with the Code of Conduct.

Previous Speakers

The inaugural freenode #live conference saw an excellent speaker line-up take to the stage, and included Matthew Garrett (Google), Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Conservancy), Deb Nicholson (Open Invention Network), John Sullivan (Free Software Foundation), Chris Lamb (Debian), Neil McGovern (GNOME), Matthew Miller (Fedora), Alan Pope (Canonical/Ubuntu), Jelle van der Waa (ArchLinux), Richard Morrell (Falanx Group), Rick Falkvinge (Private Internet Access), Myles Jackman (Open Rights Group), and many, many more.

Format

There are two talk formats for the freenode #live conference – half-hour slots and short 5-minute lightning talk slots. You may submit a proposal as “either-or,” if you would be able to tailor content to either duration if required. If you would like to host a longer, hands-on workshop then we are able to accommodate and would be happy to discuss timings with you. Please drop us an e-mail.

Full talk – 30 minutes Aiming for 25 minutes of live presentation, leaving five minutes for Q&A from the audience. Perhaps you would like to tell a story of success (or failure, equally important!), challenges, deep dive into a particular technology, changes you have driven within your project, what you envision for the future … or something entirely different!

Lightning talk – 5 minutes You will have five minutes to speak about your topic. Make it fun and engaging, perhaps this option would be great if you are looking to drum up interest in your project and expand your contributor-base? There will not be sufficient time between lightning talks to change computers and we ask that you submit your slides on time if you wish to use slides in your presentation so that we can queue these correctly in advance.

Code of Conduct

Our code of conduct can be found here.

Schedule

If your proposal is accepted, you will receive an e-mail with a proposed time slot. In the event that the allocated slot does not work for you, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can try to accommodate.

Recording

The talks will be live-streamed and recorded for archive and published publicly on the internet. In the event that company policies or legal obligations mean that you cannot consent to video recording and publishing, please do let us know as soon as possible.

Expenses

freenode is a non-profit organisation that works to promote the use and development of Free and Open Source Software, and the freenode #live conference is designed to be accessible and affordable, as such we rely on sponsorship to cover conference costs and have a very limited budget for travel and accommodation costs. However, we do have some limited capacity to assist with travel and accommodation costs for selected speakers. Please do reach out to us so that we can look at the details if you would love to speak but would otherwise be unable to make your own way to the event.

But wait ... I have questions

Not quite ready to submit? Have a question or two that need answering first? Drop us a line at [email protected], and we will get back to you!

Ready to submit?