Resending response from FOSDEM's Pascal Bleser, contains interesting points about the presence of public. Btw, there will be 85 seats in our room. Jakub ----
Second, on our devroom's mailing list, we have been debating the role of the public that visits our devroom, but can't figure out how much the public should be involved in the devroom. Is it common for the already established devrooms to focus their programs rather on the interaction with the public or the devrooms remain strictly developer-oriented?
Depends, and that is interely up to you. We provide projects with the infrastructure, and you do (pretty much) what you want with it. FOSDEM has a huge number of visitors (6000 is a safe estimate), with 90% of them at least being active contributors in open source projects. So you can be sure that the people who will end up landing in your devroom will be highly interested in either hearing more about what you do, get deeply technical information about it, propose some interaction with another project, or just genuinly contribute to what you do. Given the amount of crowd at FOSDEM, you can be sure that the room will be full. You could also plan a mix of both things, have sessions that are more "internal" but also have a few talks that are more "introductory". The complete schedule of your devroom will be on the site and in the booklet which we distribute freely to all visitors.