The FOSDEM 2026 Search DevRoom Call for Papers is now Open!

Are you passionate about open source search technologies and how they help us to find relevant data in a proverbial haystack?  Then we would love to see submissions on the latest enhancements on search libraries and related libraries.

FOSDEM 2026

FOSDEM 2026 will take place on Saturday 31st January and Sunday 1st February 2026 at ULB Solbosch Campus, Brussels, Belgium. The Search Devroom taking place on the afternoon of Sunday 1st February. Check out the event details at http://fosdem.org/.

Call for Participation

The Search DevRoom wants to showcase the current and future state of search technologies within the evolving technology landscape, with a focus on open source technologies. Possible topics could include:

1. The evolving state of search libraries such as Apache Lucene and Tantivy.

2. Improvements and issues in popular open source search engines, including Elasticsearch, Solr and OpenSearch.

3. The state of machine learning in search, including but not limited to reranking, learning to rank and embedding models.

4. How to measure search quality.

5. Enhancements in vector search and other techniques to search through multimodal data.

6. Discussions of developer experience in search and how this will evolve and improve.
7. Best practices on how to improve the developer experience for established search engines.

8. Takes on the future of full text search algorithms, including BM25 and SPLADE.

If you have a topic of interest that leverages open source search technologies, we would still love to see a submission. Please do apply!

All talk proposals should be submitted by 30th November 2025 via the FOSDEM pretalx portal available here, selecting the Search track from the dropdown. Proposals sent via other means or that are sent after the deadline will not be accepted.

Logistics

On the day, the Search DevRoom will be recorded and streamed live. We are looking for 25-minute talks (which includes 20 minutes for your presentation + 5 minutes for Q&A). The recordings will be published under the CC-BY licence as is the case for all FOSDEM content.

Timeline

2025-11-01: This CfP opens

2025-11-30 23:55 (UTC):  Submission deadline for talk proposals

2025-12-15:  Announcement of the final schedule

2026-02-01:  Search DevRoom (Sunday afternoon)