[FOSDEM] Declarative and Minimalistic Computing devroom CfP

[Manolis Ragkousis]

We are excited to announce the Call for Participation for the 
Declarative and Minimalistic Computing devroom at FOSDEM 2026, which 
will take place on Sunday, 1 February 2026 (half-day, morning) at the 
Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
The submission deadline for talk proposals is 1 December 2025.

FOSDEM is one of the most important free software conferences in the 
world and is held annually in Brussels. This year’s edition will again 
be an in-person event, bringing together thousands of contributors and 
enthusiasts from around the globe.

Our devroom welcomes talks exploring languages, systems, and approaches 
that strive for simplicity, robustness, and security through declarative 
and minimalistic design. We’re interested in projects and ideas that 
reduce complexity, minimize hardware and software dependencies, and 
promote transparent, understandable computing systems.

Examples include (but are not limited to) projects from the Scheme/Lisp 
family, Guile, Lua, Nim, Racket, Raku, Forth, and Tcl, as well as 
experimental systems that push minimalism and declarative design in new 
directions.

Minimalism and declarative programming are two important topics for
this devroom. Minimalism matters. Minimalism allows for smaller
systems that take less resources and consume less energy. More
importantly, free and open source minimalism allows for secure systems
that are easy to understand. Declarative programming is a programming
paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing
its control flow. Many languages that apply this style attempt to
minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program must
accomplish in terms of the problem domain, rather than describe how to
accomplish it as a sequence of the programming language primitives.

Finally, in this year's conference we encourage speakers to honor 
individuals in computing from a diversity perspective. Individuals who 
have inspired them and whose work is relevant to their presentations.

If you are developing or researching systems, languages, or tools that 
embrace declarative or minimalistic principles, we invite you to submit 
a proposal.
We especially encourage submissions from individuals and communities 
underrepresented in free and open-source software.

If you have something you’d like to share with your fellow developers,
please E-mail us! Reach out to
pjotr.public456 at thebird.nl or manolis837 at gmail.com if you run into any
trouble.

The deadline for submission is December 1st, 2025. Proposals must be 
submitted on FOSDEM's conference management system: 
<https://pretalx.fosdem.org/>. All submissions must go through pretalx: 
<https://fosdem.org/submit>

When submitting your talk make doubly sure to select "Declarative and
Minimalistic Computing devroom" as track (if you don't we won't find
it), and include the following information:

   * The title and subtitle of your talk
   * A short abstract of one paragraph
   * A longer description if you wish to do so
   * Links to related websites/blogs etc

To see what a final talk looks like see

   https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/gnumes/

Let's make this a fun day!

= Organizers =

  - Pjotr Prins (pjotr.public456 at thebird.nl)
  - Manolis Ragkousis (manolis837 at gmail.com)
  - Bonface Munyoki (me at bonfacemunyoki.com)
  - Jonathan McHugh (indieterminacy at libre.brussels)
  - Arun Isaac (arunisaac at systemreboot.net)
  - Amirouche Boubekki (amirouche.boubekki at gmail.com)
  - Hisham Muhammad (hisham at gobolinux.org)
  - Ludovic Courtès (ludo at gnu.org) - GNU Guile, GNU Guix
  - Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke at gnu.org) - GNU Mes project leader
  - William Byrd (webyrd at gmail.com)
  - Oliver Propst (oliver.propst at gmail.com)
  - Julien Lepiller (julien at lepiller.eu)

= Code of conduct =

   - https://fosdem.org/2026/practical/conduct/

= Original proposal =

   - https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FOSDEM2026-devroom-proposal

= Important dates =

   - Dec 1st 2025:  submission deadline for talk proposals
   - Dec 15th 2025:  announcement of the final schedule
   - Sunday, 1 February 2026:  FOSDEM!

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FOSDEM2026-devroom-declarative-and-minimalistic-computing-cfp