########################################################################### Call For Participation Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2018 CONFERENCE DATE: Saturday & Sunday 3-4 February 2018 in Brussels, Belgium DEVROOM DATE: Sunday 4 February 2018 CFP DEADLINE: Sunday 26 November 2017 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) SPEAKERS NOTIFIED: Sunday 3 December 2017 (on or before) CFP Introduction ================ Copyright law provides many of the basic legal underpinnings of Open Source and Free Software. Patent and trademark law and legal frameworks relating to data privacy and security also have significant effects on Free Software development. Governance and policies around free software projects set the rules for collaboration and can be critical to a project's success. Our community has substantial expertise in this area yet there are few venues to discuss these matters in a forum open to all. Hackers, lawyers, policy experts, and community leaders all possess expertise in these matters. TL;DR ===== Hackers, contributors and lawyers alike are encouraged to submit on any project policy or legal topic. Successful proposals will cover topics of interest at a medium to advanced level. Fill out an application on FOSDEM's Pentabarf. (See below for details.) Topics Sought ============= This DevRoom seeks proposals for 25 minute talks and/or open discussion sessions in an unconference format that address issues of software freedom project policies and legal issues that extend beyond and/or are orthogonal to technical issues faced by projects. Such topics could include, but aren't necessarily limited to: * Who controls the copyright, trademark, or patent licensing, release plans, CLA administration, or security bug reporting policies of your project, and why? What challenges have you faced in these policy areas and how are you seeking to change it? * How is your project governed? Do you have a non-profit organization, or a for-profit company that primarily controls your project, or neither? Do you wish your project governance was different? Who decided your governance initially? What politics (good and bad) have occurred around your governance choices and how have you changed your policy? Does your project have a "shadow governance", whereby technical governance is open and fair, but some entity has its own opaque political structure that influences your project? Are you worried that your project might and you don't know? Are you exploring any new solutions for governance? Do you want to ask questions of a room full of experts about your project's governance? * Legal topics of all sorts and their interaction with software freedom culture and work remain welcome, and could include: How does your project make use of legal advice? What legal advice do you give projects and what topics do you put first on the list to worry about in projects? Discuss in detail a legal and/or policy issue your project faced and how your community dealt with it. What lessons did you learn? Are some of your developers afraid to discuss legal or quasi-legal issues without their lawyers, or their employers' lawyers, present? How has that impeded or helped your project? Are your lawyers really your lawyers (e.g., do corporate lawyers for companies in your community advise the project even though not all contributors work for that company)? * Contribution and engagement policies: how does your project engage new contributors and what policy decisions did your project make to welcome new contributors? What legal issues or policy concerns has your project faced historically in its community engagement efforts, and what did you learn from these experiences? * How does money affect your community? How is funding of developers handled in your project? What policies do you set to welcome volunteers to join a community where most developers are paid? Does your project have policies that forbid funding developers directly? Does reliance on volunteer labor lead to lack of diversity since only the affluent can participate? If you had unconstrained resources at your disposal, what would you change about the funding structure of your project? Given the resources you have, what have you tried to change? Have you succeeded or failed? Would more money in the ecosystem hurt or help your project? * How do projects handle conflicts of interest and make sure that relevant interests of contributors are disclosed in important decision making discussions? * Strategies and plans for addressing harassment, exclusionary and/or discriminatory behavior in FLOSS communities. Do you have a Code of Conduct? Have you needed to enforce it? Was it successful in improving behavior and diversity in your community? * Talks on license compliance, licensing business models, and anything akin to, or building upon, what you've seen in our DevRoom before are of course welcome. (URLs to talks from previous years are below.) Regarding topic relevancy, here's the only "don't": please don't propose introductory talks; there are other venues appropriate for those. FOSDEM is the meeting place of experts in Open Source and Free Software project governance, law, and policy. This DevRoom is for intermediate to advanced topics surrounding just about anything you might call a "legal" or "policy" issue for your project! Should I Submit? ================ However, do consider that what may seem elementary to you may in fact be an intermediate topic in this area. In particular, while we expect to receive submissions from lawyers, we've found in our careers that non-lawyers often know just as much (and often more) about these topics than lawyers. Developers and other Free Software project participants who regularly face complex policy and legal questions are strongly and particularly encouraged to submit proposals. Historically, some of the most lively and intriguing talks in this DevRoom's previous years have been from developers who have been thrust (often due to circumstances beyond their control) into dealing with legal and policy issues for Open Source and Free Software. Look at past talks in our DevRoom for inspiration: https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/legal_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/legal_issues_devroom.html CFP Schedule And Submission Details =================================== Submit proposals NO LATER THAN 26 November 2017 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) Please use the following URL to submit your talk to FOSDEM 2018: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18 and follow these rules: * Select as the Track "Legal and Policy Issues devroom". * Include a title. (Note that "Subtitle" entry doesn't appear on all conference documents, so make sure "Title" can stand on its own without "Subtitle" present.) * Include an Abstract of about 500 characters and a full description of any length you wish, but in both fields, please be concise, but clear and descriptive. * Indicate a 25 minute time slot. If you select any other time amount, your submission is very likely to be rejected. Only choose a longer slot if your proposal is exceptionally interesting and is a group discussion rather than a solo talk. * Use the "Links" sub-area to your past work in the field you'd like to share. Particularly helpful are recordings (audio/video) of your past talks on the subject or past papers/blog posts you've written on the subject. * You are encouraged to enter biographic information under the "Person" section (e.g. you may upload an image, enter your background in the "Description" tab, and sites of interest under the "Links" tab). * State that you agree to CC BY-SA-4.0 or CC BY-4.0 licensing of your talk in the "Submission Notes" field. Add a statement such as this: "Should my presentation be scheduled for FOSDEM 2018, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides and any other materials presented under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International license. * Also in the notes field, confirm your availability to speak on Sunday, 4 February 2018 in Brussels. (You may include time slots of non-availability on Sunday, but this may negatively impact acceptance decisions.) Failure to follow these instructions above (and those on the FOSDEM 2018 site) may result in automatic rejection of your talk submission. However, if you have trouble with submission via the official system, please do contact <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us> for assistance. Diversity Statement ------------------- The organizers of this DevRoom are committed to increasing the diversity of the free software movement. To that end, our CFP process takes demographic information into account in order to build a program that features as many different voices and perspectives as possible. If you are comfortable doing so, please share any demographic information about yourself in the "Submissions Notes". Such disclosure is not mandatory by any means. No Assurance of Acceptance -------------------------- The organizers (listed below) realize many of our friends and colleagues will respond to this CFP. We welcome submissions from all, but an invitation from any of us to submit is *not* an assurance of acceptance. We typically must make hard decisions. This year, our DevRoom is one day, so unfortunately we expect that most proposals will be rejected. Please, submit your best possible work and put effort into crafting your submission to give yourself the best chance of acceptance. About the DevRoom Organizers ============================ The co-organizers of the FOSDEM 2018 Legal and Policy Issues DevRom are (in alphabetical order by surname): - Richard Fontana, Member of Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative; Senior Commercial Counsel, Red Hat - Bradley M. Kuhn, Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy and Member of Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation - Tom Marble, Creative Technologist, Informatique, Inc. - Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, pro bono counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the GNOME Foundation, Visiting Scholar/Faculty team of Center for Research in Open Source Software, University of California Santa Cruz You are welcome to contact us all at <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us> with questions about this CFP. ###########################################################################