[FOSDEM] FOSDEM 2022 - Distributions Devroom CFP

[Vipul Siddharth]

We are excited to announce that the call for proposals is now open for
the Distributions devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM 2022, to be hosted
virtually on February 6th.

As more and more workloads are being considered for containerization
in the future and are finally landing in virtualized environments
today, distributions remain a critical success factor and are more
important than ever. Containers, like virtual machines, are not
magical and rely on piles of software being assembled in a way that is
repeatable, reliable, and functional. This is at the very heart of the
problem that distributions have always solved.

Each distribution is responsible for building, testing, and releasing
software as well as managing the lifecycle of each application in the
collection. Additionally, distributions do very important work in
ensuring that various versions of upstream software work well together
and can co-exist. Distributions are also, often responsible, for
"de-vendoring" upstream software so that security fixes can be applied
more quickly.

We welcome submissions targeted at contributors interested in issues
unique to distributions, especially in the following topics:

## Topics and Areas of Focus

#### Focus Areas

- The ways that distribution technologies can be leveraged to allow
for easier creation of a multi-verse of artifacts from single source
trees. This includes the increasing move toward self-contained
applications and providing multiple non-parallel installed versions of
software.

- Efforts being made in shared environments around Build/Test/Release cycles.

- Topics related to the delivery problem as it impacts updates in
terms of both size and rollback/reliability are expected to be
featured.

#### Additional Topic Ideas

- Distribution and Community collaborations, eg: how does code flow
from developers to end users across communities, ensuring trust and
code audibility

- Automating building software for redistribution to minimize human
involvement, eg: bots that branch and build software, bots that
participate as team members extending human involvement

- Cross-distribution collaboration on common issues, eg: content
distribution, infrastructure, and documentation

- Growing distribution communities, eg: onboarding new users, helping
new contributors learn community values and technology,  increasing
contributor technical skills, recognizing and rewarding contribution

- Principles of Rolling Releases, Long Term Supported Releases (LTS),
Feature gated releases, and calendar releases

- Distribution construction, installation, deployment, packaging and
content management

- Balancing new code and active upstreams verus security updates, back
porting and minimization of user breaking changes

- Delivering architecture independent software universally across
architectures within the confines of distribution systems

- Effectively communicating the difference in experience across
architectures for developers, packagers, and users

- Working with vendors and including them in the community

- The future of distributions, emerging trends and evolving user
demands from the idea of a platform

- Creating a secure supply chain by evaluating upstream components and
providing a secure source for downstreams

Ideal submissions are actionable and opinionated. Submissions may be
in the form of 25 or 50 minute talks, panel sessions, round-table
discussions, or Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

Due to the virtual format of FOSDEM, the preferred length for talk
submissions is 25 minutes.

Important Dates
------
- Submission Deadline: Dec 20th 2021 @ 2359 UTC
- Acceptance notifications: Dec 31th 2021 @ 2359 UTC
- Final schedule announcement: Jan 14th 2021 @ 2359 UTC

How to submit
--------------
Visit https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22

1.) If you do not have an account, create one at
https://penta.fosdem.org/user/new_account and sign in
2.) Click 'Create Event'
3.) Enter your presentation details
4.) Be sure to select the Distributions Devroom track!
5.) Submit

What to include
---------------
- The title of your submission
- A 1-paragraph Abstract
- A longer description including the benefit of your talk to your
target audience, including a definition of your target audience.
- Approximate length / type of submission (talk, BoF, ...)
- Links to related websites/blogs/talk material (if any)

Administrative Notes
----------------
All presentations will need to be pre-recorded and put into our system
at least a couple of weeks before the event.

Once your talk is accepted, we will assign you a volunteer to help you
to produce the pre-recorded content.
The volunteer will review the content and ensure its quality. They
will also be responsible to ensure that the content is into the system
and ready to broadcast.

During the stream of your talk, you must be available online for the
Q/A session.

The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM
content (CC-BY).

If you have any questions, please contact the devroom organizers:
distributions-devroom at lists.fosdem.org
(https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/distributions-devroom)

Kind Regards
-- 
Ben Cotton & Vipul Siddharth
Distributions devroom managers