[FOSDEM] Call for Participation: "Local First, Sync engines and CRDTs" devroom at FOSDEM 2026

[Niko - NextGraph]

Hello everyone,

This year, the FOSDEM created a new devroom for "Local First, Sync 
engines and CRDTs", and we are very excited to share with you the 
present Call for Participation. The upcoming edition of FOSDEM 2026 will 
be held on Saturday 31st of January and Sunday 1st of February, at the 
ULB Solbosch Campus, in Brussels, Belgium. Our devroom will be held on 
Saturday afternoon, from 15:00 to 19:00.

FOSDEM is a free event for open source software developers to meet, 
share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers from 
all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

Local-First is a new paradigm for developing decentralized applications 
and software, following the motto "You own your data, in spite of the 
cloud". In the last years, it gained increasing adoption among 
programmers for its interesting properties: real-time collaboration that 
can also go offline temporarily and will then sync and merge without 
conflicts; data ownership for users, as all data is available on their 
devices; getting rid of cloud services and surveillance capitalism; 
increased security, resilience and privacy; and more.

In the context of a much needed digital sovereignty in Europe, and 
elsewhere in the world, Free and Open Source collaborative and 
decentralized solutions are in strong demand. We believe that 
Local-First is a good answer to many of those challenges.

Multiple frameworks, sync protocols, P2P protocols, sync engines, 
Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) libraries, collaborative 
editors and apps, are coming to life and the developer experience is 
getting better by the day. We also feel the need, as members of those 
communities, to gather forces, exchange, and cooperate on various 
subjects. FOSDEM will be the perfect place for that. This devroom is 
also an opportunity for all developers curious and interested in 
Local-First, to learn more about the topic and the progress recently made.

We invite all developers, engineers and researchers to present their 
work, contribute their advances, and meet in Brussels for some 
interesting cross-project exchanges and discussions.

For this first edition of the Local First devroom, we are welcoming 
contributions in the form of talks, presentations, demos, and panel 
proposal, related to :
- Introduction to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), 
Local-First, Sync protocols and sync engines, their challenges and benefits.
- Free and Open Source projects or libraries that implement CRDTs, 
and/or Local First sync protocols.
- Research papers published in the public domain, in the field of Local 
First.
- FOSS Frameworks, SDKs, Sync Engines, decentralized databases that 
enable Local First app development.
- Open source user-facing Applications that leverage Local First 
technologies, including real-time collaborative applications that can 
work offline.
- and more. Don't hesitate to propose your best idea.

You can find this CfP and share it with others at the link:

https://openlocalfirst.org

= Submission process =

Please submit your proposal at https://fosdem.org/submit before Friday 
December 5th, 2025 at midnight CET.

Warning: The FOSDEM Pretalx homepage states that the deadline is 
2025-11-16 but this only applies to the main track. For devrooms, the 
deadline is later, and specially for our devroom, the deadline is 5th of 
December.
When submitting your proposal, make sure you choose the “Local First, 
Sync engine, CRDTs” entry in the track drop-down menu, otherwise, your 
proposal might go unnoticed. Don't hesitate to include an estimate of 
the time needed for your talk in the speaker notes (maximum 30min). We 
will try to accommodate equivalent time slots for everyone, with also 
some room for Q&A, unless you state otherwise. If we receive too many 
high quality proposals, time slots might be shortened.

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and 
Open Source Software and Open Research. We encourage you to submit your 
proposal as early as possible, so we have enough time to review it as it 
deserves. Before submitting a proposal, please make sure that you will 
be able to attend FOSDEM and deliver your presentation in person. The 
conference does not accept remote presentations. We are not able to 
offer travel funding for prospective speakers, but entrance is free for 
everyone. Between the 12th and the 15th of December, if your proposal is 
selected, you will have to enter in the pretalx interface and validate 
your participation; this is important. Once the schedule of the devroom 
is finalized, we will contact you and share more technical details with 
you so you can prepare your talk successfully.

= Important dates =

* December 5th, 2025: CfP submission deadline
* December 12th, 2025 or earlier: notification of acceptance.
* December 15th, 2025: announcement of final schedule on FOSDEM website
* January 31st, 2026: devroom day, from 15:00 to 19:00

= Recordings =

As always at FOSDEM, the talks and Q/A sessions will be recorded. The 
recordings will be published under the same license as all FOSDEM 
content (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). By agreeing to present at FOSDEM, you 
automatically give permission to be recorded.

= Code of Conduct =

Following the release of the updated code of conduct for FOSDEM[1], we'd 
like to remind all speakers and attendees that all of the presentations 
and discussions in our devroom are held under the guidelines set in the 
CoC and we expect attendees, speakers, and volunteers to follow the CoC 
at all times.

= =

To share the link of this devroom with others, please use: 
https://openlocalfirst.org

Hope to see you soon at the Local First devroom!

[1] https://fosdem.org/2026/practical/conduct/

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