We are organising a **Decentralised Messaging** devroom at FOSDEM 2027, and we are looking for speakers! This devroom is a joint effort between the Matrix, Delta Chat, and XMPP communities, focused on federated and self-hostable chat. Although our architectures look pretty different under the hood, we face many of the same challenges. We want to get together to share operational and implementation experiences, discuss shared technical hurdles, and look at practical ways our networks can cooperate. Each of our communities has plenty of material to share, and we are also reaching beyond them to invite contributors working on chat across other federated and decentralised ecosystems (such as AT Protocol and ActivityPub), as well as developers building reusable components like moderation tools. Talks that others can learn from are preferred; marketing talks will be rejected. ## Important Dates - The devroom will take place on Sunday, **January 31 2027** at [ULB (Campus Solbosch)](https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1632534522). - Speakers must present in person at FOSDEM in Brussels. - Submission deadline is Friday, November 20, 2026 at 23:55 UTC - Speakers notified: November 27, 2026 - Schedule published: December 7, 2026 **Please distribute this CFP as widely as possible to interested parties!** ## Topics We welcome technical presentations, demos, and experience reports on topics including: - Practical bridging and gateways between decentralised messaging protocols. - Tackling spam, abuse, and moderation across federated topologies without centralised gatekeeping. - End-to-end encryption challenges and implementations, including group E2EE (such as MLS). - Decentralised key transparency and identity discovery. - Usable security, UX, and improving the onboarding experience for novice users on federated systems. - Building messaging tools and chat extensions on other federated stacks (e.g. AT Protocol, ActivityPub). - Standalone and reusable building blocks (e.g. shared moderation tooling, trust & safety frameworks). - Server operations, scaling federation, and sync optimisation for low-power mobile clients. - Lightning talks highlighting new experiments or niche tools. ## Submission process We ask for a short talk abstract, a proposed duration, and a brief speaker biography. Links to your code repositories, project websites, or prior talks are also appreciated. Submissions must be made through [Pretalx](https://fosdem.org/submit) no later than **Friday, November 20, 2026**. The suggested duration for a regular talk is **25 minutes** (20 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q&A). If the best format for your project or idea is a **5-to-10-minute lightning talk**, we will happily accommodate lightning sessions as well. Talks are streamed and published under CC-BY, and the FOSDEM Code of Conduct applies. Depending on the volume and variety of submissions, we may contact you to adapt your talk length to fit the final room schedule. A programme committee with at least one reviewer from each organising community reviews all submissions jointly. Talks will be selected based on technical interest, relevance, and overall project diversity across the schedule. ## Volunteering If you would like to help to keep things running smoothly on the day, we’d be grateful for a few extra hands! Please get in touch via decentralised-messaging-devroom-manager at fosdem.org Andy & the Decentralised Messaging devroom managers (Daniel, Guus, Holger, Matthew) -- Andy Piper The Matrix.org Foundation links: https://andypiper.me | fediverse: @andypiper@macaw.social