This weekend I attended the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. FOSDEM is a conference for all things free and open source software. It was my first time attending, and I enjoyed it immensely. While it’s fresh in my mind, here are a few notes and learnings.

I had only passed briefly through Brussels before and did not know what to expect from the city. For the record, I spent most of my time between Schaerbeek, where I stayed, and the site of FOSDEM in Solbosch. It turns out that the city, or at least the parts that I saw, is clean, modern and vibrant. There is history everywhere, but it’s also obvious that a ton of investment has been dropped on the city over recent years. On every turn there is the contrast of old and new, bricks and steel girders, and privilege and struggle. In this way, for better and worse, it reminded me strongly of London - more so than any other city I have visited, in fact. I found the overall effect exhilarating and would definitely return to explore more meaningfully.

The spoken languages are also interesting. My host informed me that Brussels has more languages spoken in it than any other city in Europe. I have not verified this claim but it seems credible. In practice, the predominant language seems to be French but conversations in Germanic-sounding languages, which I assume are primarily but not exclusively Flemish, are commonly heard in the street. English seems to be spoken by almost everybody and as a bumbling non-Francophone, I never felt uncomfortable doing so.

Getting around is easy on the trams, and the public transport works in a similar way to London - just swipe a card or mobile payment device when entering a station or tram. Citymapper saved the day for me several times. I can speak from experience when I say that there is more than one university campus in the Solbosch area, and it’s easy to plan a journey to the wrong one and end up with an unexpected thirty minute walk. Other than that the trams are frequent and and easy to use.

Anyway, on to FOSDEM. If you love FOSS then you will probably love FOSDEM. The conference is held on the huge and very agreeable Université Libre de Bruxelles campus, so even with thousands or even tens of thousands of attendees I rarely felt claustrophobic. There were sometimes queues for rooms or packed corridors but it never took long to find fresh air and space if needed.

The schedule is of course published in advance, so peruse it and make a list of unmissable talks before arriving. I found that the timings were adhered to impeccably throughout the weekend.

Despite the dozens of concurrent tracks, many talks become full, especially on Saturday. If you want to be sure of attending a talk, get to the room at least half an hour in advance. Combined with the cost of walking from room to room (the campus is busy and quite large, this can easily take ten minutes or more) this means that scheduling back-to-back talks in different rooms will probably only work if the rooms are physically very close.

There are fast food trucks on the site, and contrary to what I’d read on the internet I never saw the queues become particularly out of control. But the choice also seemed limited. Bring a packed lunch, or walk for ten minutes to Chaussée de Boondael which has supermarkets and a takeaway/restaurant that serves the best spicy Falafel-and-chip wrap I have ever eaten. I can neither remember the name nor find it on Google, but you might get lucky.

Finally: I came for the tech but I’ll return for the politics. As the opening talk of the conference made a point of stating, free software has never been disconnected from politics. Quite the reverse - making free software is fundamentally a political act in itself. But with the current precarious state of the world, increasing digital resilience and sovereignty is becoming more important and relevant than ever for individuals, organisations and nations alike. This theme seemed to percolate through every talk that I attended. I may reflect on and write more about this. Either way, combined with the thousands of dedicated and passionate attendees FOSDEM was for me a powerful reinforcement of the continuing and increasing relevance of the movement.

Thanks to all of the organisers and volunteers from a first-time attendee, this will surely not be my last.