[FOSDEM] Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom CFP
Tom Marble
tmarble at info9.net
Sat Oct 15 21:47:37 CEST 2016
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Call For Participation
Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2017
CONFERENCE DATE: Saturday & Sunday 4-5 February 2017 in Brussels, Belgium
CFP DEADLINE: Sunday 27 November 2016 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
SPEAKERS NOTIFIED: Sunday 4 December 2016 (on or before)
CFP Introduction
================
Open Source and Free Software originated as hacks on copyright law.
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. We should discuss
these matters in an 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 and 45 minute talks and/or panel
discussions 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:
* Strategies and plans for addressing harrassment, exclusionary and/or
discriminatory behavior in FLOSS communities.
* 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?
* 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?
* 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?
* 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/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 27 November 2016 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
Please use the following URL to submit your talk to FOSDEM 2017:
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17
and follow the following 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 whether you seek a 25 or 45 minute slot. NOTE:
the quality of the submission needs to be progressively *more
impressive* the longer time you ask for and we may accept your
submission with an alternate duration as our schedule is so tight.
* 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 2017, 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
and Sunday, 4-5 February 2017 in Brussels. (You may include time slots
of non-availability on Saturday and/or Sunday, but this may negatively
impact acceptance decisions.)
Failure to follow these instructions above (and those on the FOSDEM
2017 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.
Travel Funding does not exist (sadly)!
--------------------------------------
We are volunteer track organizers of a volunteer conference. We
cannot sponsor travel ourselves. However, please *do* submit anyway
if you aren't sure about your travel funding and mention in your
application that you have uncertainties. We would like the opportunity to
talk and discuss the situation with highly exceptional speakers who would
like to join our DevRoom but can't due to lack of funding. We can't
promise anything, but it is better to know if there are qualified
speakers available that need funding. Knowing that will help us find
funding in future!
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.
About the DevRoom Organizers
============================
The co-organizers of the FOSDEM 2017 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, Member of Board of Directors of the Free Software
Foundation and Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom
Conservancy
- 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.
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