Have a busy few weeks of work travel coming up but will attempt to add something…

However I just realised that for the first time in ages I won't actually be able to make FOSDEM in 2026 as I will be back in Melbourne… Hoping to attend Everything Open there though :)

Chris


On 23 Sep 2025, at 21:57, Louis Taylor <louis@fosdem.org> wrote:

Hi, both sound good!

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 5:17 PM Lucas Chiesa <lucas.chiesa@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi!

I would like to propose two speakers:

-- Steve Cousins:
Steve Cousins is currently in the Open Robotics Board of Directors (https://osralliance.org/leadership/) and is an executive director for the Standford Robotics Center (https://src.stanford.edu/about-people). His work leading Willow Garage popularized the open source framework ROS as the de-facto robotics platform, both for research and commercial products.
He can give an interesting presentation focusing on this two main points:
* How choosing open source when developing the early versions of ROS shaped the evolution of Robotics, and how the creation of OSRF as a spin off  from Willow Garage allowed ROS to grow far beyond Willow Garage business.
* How is ROS currently being developed with OSR being acquired by https://www.intrinsic.ai/ and the creation of the OSRA to maintain the open source project even under Google ownership.

Finaly, I believe that shining a brighter light on Open Source robotics can be very useful to help projects like ROS, dora-rs that are now threatened by non open source tools from Nvidia and other big players.

-- Margarita Manterola:
She is a long time debian contributor, open source advocate (particularly doing women outreach), worked at Google building their debian based distribution, worked on smaller startups with open source products, and is now part of igalia. Besides, she is starting a youtube channel making accessible technology videos in Spanish.

She had been involved in Open Source for decades, has spoken in numerous conferences, She could make very interesting presentations on a number of topics. Including but not limited to:
* Using open source in commercial environments, from big corporations to successful startups.
* Commercialization models for open source products (open core, to fully open source).
* Understanding the true cost of maintaining open source in developers' free time.

She has given numerous conferences on different Open Source events, and has been attending FOSDEM for many years now.

References:
"Oh no, not again."
- A bowl of petunias on its way to certain death.


On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 2:58 PM Eriol Fox <erioldoesdesign@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to propose Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, the CEO and founder of penpot. Penpot has been gaining credible popularity in the design and dev world not just because of it's strong foundations and care towards open source, but also because it is challenging proprietary design software in a way that feels pivotal for UI and UX designers and the dev teams that are working with designers. I feel like penpot is doing for UI/UX what Blender does for 3D graphics.

I've already spoken with Pablo recently at a conference and he's very interested in speaking on the main track. Additionally I think it would be fantastic to gather other design and visual OSS founders and speakers to speak about the importance of things like art, design and possibly even music made in OSS.




Eriol Fox: Human-rights centred designer 
My PGP fingerprint: 654C AC5C DF3C 966E 6A09 4A5D F393 3F30 F404 2DAD


On Tue, 23 Sept 2025, 21:42 Bastian, <bastian@fosdem.org> wrote:
Hi Content Team,

Thank you all again for supporting us with the content for FOSDEM 2026.

We now have the official dates for FOSDEM 2026! It will take place from Saturday, January 31, to Sunday, February 1st, 2026.
Now that we have the dates, we can start discussing and confirming potential main track speakers. We'd love for you to start proposing people.

How to propose a speaker

If you have someone in mind for the main track, please send us a very brief proposal with the speaker's name and topic.
Once we give you a quick "thumbs up", here on the mailing list or in the matrix chat, you can feel free to officially reach out to them and get them on board.

Please get them to fill out the following private form we have already prepared.
Speakers you recommend will have a preferred spot on the short list for the main track, so their chances of being accepted are higher.
This is a special benefit for your early recommendations, so please encourage them to fill out the form.

https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp?access_code=Aib8bu

We look forward to hearing your ideas.

Cheers,
FOSDEM Program Team
-- 
Sebastian Grömcke
FOSDEM Staff Member
https://fosdem.org
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