########################################################################### Call For Participation Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2020 CONFERENCE DATE: Saturday & Sunday 1-2 February 2020 in Brussels, Belgium DEVROOM DATE: Saturday 1 February 2020 CFP DEADLINE: Sunday 17 November 2019 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) SPEAKERS NOTIFIED: Sunday 24 November 2019 (on or before) Quick CFP Overview (TL;DR) ========================== Hackers, developers, contributors and lawyers alike are encouraged to submit on any FOSS-related policy or legal topic. What's NEW this year is that in addition to talks we are also hoping to host lively debates and some live collaboration (think unconference) sessions. A great way to understand many sides of an issues is debate, and we're adding debates this year as an official part of the agenda in our DevRoom! Submit to one or more of: 1. Debate position: pro/con Please enter a "talk" proposal with the prefix "DEBATE: " followed by the debate topic. In the abstract, state your position. Include all relevant affiliations in your bio ("Person" description in Pentabarf). Submitting for a debate means you are willing to be (part of) the team representing your position. You may propose participating in a debate position that you do not necessarily agree with but would enjoy arguing for. Possible debate topics include (but feel free to propose your own): * Are open source "sustainability" solutions the answer or a trap? * Are venture capital funded enterprises helping FOSS? * Have companies destroyed FOSS in the name of the community? * Are corporate GPLv2 cure commitments helpful? * Should FOSS licenses be enforced at all? What means are acceptable if so? * Do FOSS compliance companies have a pernicious effect on FOSS? * Are open source trade associations a menace or simply a natural evolution for FOSS? * Should FOSS licenses be designed to advance general public policy or social goals? * Should upstream projects be responsible for handling backporting of security updates? * Do contributors deserve the right to hold their own copyrights, or should their employers have them? * Do patent non-aggression pacts stabilize FOSS or distract from the fundamental scourge of software patenting? * Do the existing Free Software Definition and Open Source Definitions serve the needs of the public? * Should for-profit companies be licensing authorities? * Bill of Materials for FOSS: does this actually help with compliance issues? The organizers ask that submitters strive to overcome any shyness or nervousness about participating in a debate. We realize it is an unprecedented format for FOSS conferences, but we believe it will breathe new life into discussions on FOSS policy topics, and we also believe it will be a lot of fun. Please join us in this exciting experiment! We will collate submissions and join people up on topics they wish to debate and get everyone in touch for plenty of pre-event prep. Debates will be moderated by one of the organizers. 2. Talk proposal We seek proposals for 25 minute talks that address issues of software freedom project policies and legal issues that extend beyond and/or are orthogonal to technical issues faced by projects. For ideas about talk topics see the background information below. 3. Collaboration Topic Please enter a "talk" proposal with the prefix "COLLAB: " followed by the collaboration topic from below (or suggest a new one) Submitting for a collaboration topic means you would like to actively participate in this topic. * How can we give users standing in free/open software/hardware? How can we motivate end users to care about FOSS if they can't express their preference? What tools do we have beyond the "court of public opinion"? Can we invent a NEW legal hack? * Extensions of FOSS principles to other domains (e.g. hardware, data) have not enjoyed the success of the software domain: what could we do better? * How can the myriad of governance organizations better serve community needs? You can respond to this CFP by creating a user account on Pentabarf and creating one (or more) talk proposals by November 17, 2019. See details below. CFP Details =========== 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 relevance to Free Software development. Governance and policies around free software projects (beyond mere outbound licensing) 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, developers, contributors, lawyers, policy experts, and community leaders all possess expertise in these matters. This DevRoom seeks proposals for three types of content: (a) 25 minute talks, (b) debate positions, or (c) collaboration topics in an unconference format. Sessions should 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? * How do ethical issues intersect with your project? How do those issues interact with software freedom? How can we protect user's rights in the current legal and technical landscape? Are there ways to mitigate the hold that click through terms of service have over the average person's use of software? Are privacy regulations like GDPR having any appreciable impact on software freedom? * 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 influence the direction of 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? What strategies do you use to you handle toxic people 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! NOTE: your topic might be an even better fit for the Community DevRoom. We are collaborating with the Community DevRoom organizers to avoid topic overlap and encourage you to see their CFP which will be posted here: https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2019q4/thread.html In short, proposals for this DevRoom should focus on specific policy and legal questions in FOSS. If your proposal does not cover a specific policy or legal issue, then the Community DevRoom may be more appropriate. 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/2019/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/ 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 Separately you may be interested in Conservancy's Second Annual Copyleft Conference which occurs the Monday after FOSDEM. For more information please see: https:// copyleftconf.org If your proposal is a talk (not a debate proposal), and is related to Copyleft please consider submitting your talk to CopyleftConf. CFP Schedule And Submission Details =================================== Submit proposals NO LATER THAN 17 November 2019 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) Please use the following URL to submit your talk to FOSDEM 2020: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20 and follow these steps: * 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.) Shorter and more concise is better! * 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. * 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 2020, 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 Saturday, 1 February 2020 in Brussels. (You may include time slots of non-availability on Saturday, but this may negatively affect acceptance decisions.) Failure to follow these instructions above (and those on the FOSDEM 2020 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 "Submission 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 2020 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom are (in alphabetical order by surname): - Richard Fontana, Senior Commercial Counsel, Red Hat - Bradley M. Kuhn, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy - Tom Marble, Creative Technologist, Informatique, Inc. - Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, pro bono counsel, Adjunct Lecturer-In-Law Columbia Law School, 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. ###########################################################################