We are excited to announce the *Tool the Docs devroom* is back for FOSDEM 2025! The developer room focuses on *free and open source tools for writing, managing, testing, and rendering documentation*. It will run on *Saturday, 1st February* for half a day in the morning. ## Why present FOSDEM is one of the world’s largest gatherings of Free Software contributors and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2025, it will be held on Saturday, February 1st, and Sunday, February 2nd. This year, we are still focussing mostly on tooling, but are also welcoming talks on documentation principles and practices. We are inviting proposals for talks on the following subjects: - Tools for writing, plus discussions on the principles and practices of writing for technical audiences. - Tools for managing documentation. - Tools for testing documentation, plus principles and practices for testing. - Tools for automating aspects of documentation. - Tools for rendering and distributing documentation. - AI tools for any of the above, as long as they are open (https://opensource.org/ai) *We welcome proposals from those working with tools for documentation as well as those creating and maintaining them.* This is a great opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a technical audience from a wide range of free and open-source communities. *Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM and anything you show must be in the spirit of open source.* ## How to submit We are accepting talks of 20-30 minutes, with time for questions afterwards. Please let us know in your submission if you want less or more time. Ideally, keep your submissions to one Devroom, or speak with the organisers of those rooms to discuss which is the best fit. All submissions have to be made in the pretalx event planning tool: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/cfp While creating your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), and some information about yourself (name, bio, and photo. If you previously used Pentabarf, sorry, no data was migrated.). Select "Tool the docs" under the *Track* dropdown. ## Important Dates - Submission open: 30th October 2024 - Submission deadline: 1st December 2024 - Acceptance notifications: 6th December - Final schedule announcement: 15th December 2024 - Devroom: February 1st 2025 ## Recording Permission The talks in the Tool the Docs developer room will be audio and video recorded and possibly streamed live, too. In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree to have your presentation recorded and published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to be recorded and to have recordings–including slides and other presentation-related documents–published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License. Sincerely, [Name]”. See you at FOSDEM! Chris Chinchilla, Kristof Van Tomme, Erin McKean, Rebeka Nagy-Mikola, Jack Baldry, Laura Vass