[FOSDEM] CfP - Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) devroom

[Alexios Zavras]

The following can also be found at: https://hackmd.io/@spdx/fosdem2024-cfp



# FOSDEM 2024 - SBOM devroom info and CfP

## Overview

[FOSDEM] is one of the world's premier meetings of free software developers, with thousands of people attending each year. FOSDEM 2024 will take place on the weekend of 3-4 February 2024 in-person in Brussels.

This is the Call for Participation (CfP) in the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Devroom at FOSDEM 2024.

## Details

The SBOM Devroom will take place for a full day (09:00-17:00), on Sunday 4 February 2024, and will be an in-person event in a room to be announced later.

The SBOM Devroom at FOSDEM is an informal, technical, in-person event oriented to authors, users, and enthusiasts of FLOSS programs that produce, consume, or transform SBOMs.

While other domains like construction, mechanical engineering, or even computer hardware have long used the concept of Bill of Materials (BOMs), software traditionally has not followed this best practice. There have been efforts running for over a decade to address this, and recent developments have pushed forward the use and wide adoption of Software BOMs. Since most of today’s software is made up of Open Source, it is important that this information can be accurately conveyed. It includes, but is not limited to, metadata such as name and version but also licensing or security information.

The goal of the devroom is for interested people to get in touch with each other, exchange ideas and opinions, have interesting and hopefully productive discussions, and finally what is most important: have fun.

**We are looking for presenters!**

## Call for participation

We are interested in presentations on any topic related to Software Bill of Materials: content, definitions, standardization efforts, tools, etc.

An indicative, non-exclusive, list of topics is:

- Tools that produce SBOMs or related information
- Tools that consume SBOMs to generate other information 
- Case studies and lessons learned from real-life use or introduction of SBOMs
- Use of different types of SBOMs (e.g., Design, Source, Build, Deployed, Runtime, etc.) in the Software Supply Chain
- Verification and linking of SBOMs to other relevant artifacts
- Special areas of interest not covered by current SBOM formats, that need discussion to be included

Any effort that would lead on increasing collaboration between different approaches and tools is particularly encouraged.

### Key dates

* 8 December: Submission deadline
* 19 December: Announcement of devroom schedule
* 4 February: SBOM devroom in FOSDEM (You must be available in person to give your presentation!)

### Submission process

Please use the [Pretalx] system to submit a talk proposal for the devroom.

Remember to select "Software Bill of Materials" for the "Track" pop-up selection!

### First-time speakers

FOSDEM devrooms are a welcoming environment for people who have never given a talk before. Please feel free to contact the devroom administrators personally if you would like to ask any questions about it.

### Submission guidelines

The proposal submission system will ask for all the information, in a sucession of three screens. Note that this year FOSDEM is using a new submission system, Pretalx. User accounts from the old system (Pentabarf) are not valid, so you will need to create a new account.

We will be looking for relevance to the conference and devroom themes, but essentially any presentation about SBOMs would qualify. Please note that the audience is expected to be _developers_ of Free and Open Source Software and will most probably be _knowledgeable_ in at least some aspects of SBOMs. Therefore aim your presentation accordingly.

Feel free to indicate in the "Submission Notes" area your preferred duration for your presentation between 5 and 45 minutes, but please note that the final decision on duration will be made by the devroom organizers based on the number of accepted proposals. As the overall duration of the devroom is fixed, the only way to accommodate more speakers is by limiting the length of each talk. Keep in mind that, as the event will be in-person, we also need to account for switching between speakers. Shorter presentations are **strongly** encouraged!

Please note FOSDEM aims to record and live-stream all talks. The CC-BY license is used for the recordings.

## Volunteers needed

To make the devroom run successfully, we are always looking for volunteers. If you will be attending the devroom and would like to help, please reach out to the organizers!

## Spread the word and discuss

If you know of any mailing lists or other online venues where this info and CfP would be relevant, please feel free to forward this document.

## Contact

The organizers of the devroom can be reached by sending email to sbom-devroom-manager at fosdem.org. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any inquiry or suggestion for the devroom.

For any private queries, you may also contact the organizers directly:
- Alexios Zavras <fosdem at zvr.gr>
- Kate Stewart <stewart at linux.com>
- Adolfo García Veytia <puerco at chainguard.dev>

[FOSDEM]: https://fosdem.org
[Pretalx]: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2024/cfp

-- zvr -