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Seeing #FOSDEM photos streaming across my Mastodon feed does not spark joy in me this year. Not that I have FOMO (you can't convince me to cross the oceans for "spend 2 days unsuccessfully looking for each other in jampacked hallways & rooms while jetlagged"), but rather because nobody is wearing masks in the pictures I've seen so far, and I worry about this laissez-faire 12,000-attendees indoors event potentially leading to more of my fellow FLOSS community members riddled with long CoViD.
@nekohayo Yeah, same feeling.
The fact that FOSDEM didn't even attempt to do anything at all to try to prevent the spread of COVID (& the "FOSDEM flu" cocktail of viruses) means I (and many others) can't even think of attending ever again (unless they change their tune in upcoming years). 
There's some hope: They had issues with the lack of a code of conduct for years, then a flimsy one for a while ( http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2015/02/01/the-fosdem-conundrum/ ), but now have a real one.
But COVID requires being proactive too.
@nekohayo On the other hand, FOSDEM hasn't done anything at all to try solve the root of so many of their issues: Overcrowding (which impacts overall experience and also amplifies conduct issues and disease spread).
That requires being proactive and creative problem solving — just like having measures against COVID.
However, working ways of avoiding COVID have been thought about already elsewhere:
- ventilation
- masks
- distancing & avoidance
- policies to not attend when sick
- etc.
@nekohayo FOSDEM has also done nothing about accessibility in general:
- Many rooms still aren't accessible for mobility reasons (and the crowing makes it worse)
- There's no fragrance-free policy (https://csw.ucla.edu/toolkit) and bathrooms use scented products (incl. soaps)
- Food trucks did not list allergens or if something is vegetarian or vegan or not (although this might've changed)
- There are no sign language interpreters
- Videos after the fact do not have subtitles
@nekohayo They won't even accept subtitles from people as a distributed effort.
I tried to submit some last year, but they refused. They said I should transcribe all the videos myself and set up a server for all videos and subtitles. (WHAT?!)
It's literally a tiny sidecar text file (.vtt) that should be included next to each video. It can be linked from their website.
It can be a distributed effort, and Whisper ( https://github.com/openai/whisper ) can even do most of the work in an automated way.
@nekohayo Anyway, got a little off topic, but just as examples of where FOSDEM doesn't even have guidelines and could start an initiative, even for things where they can ask for volunteers.
These are all examples showing that FOSDEM has issues respecting their attendees wellbeing and how they don't do anything at all unless they're repeatedly called out about it… and even then do the bare minimum.
So I'm not hopeful about FOSDEM implementing any COVID measures (or any other things mentioned).
@aral @nekohayo FOSDEM's closing talk made a point (right after they bragged about being "the largest conference in the world") about how they prefer donations which would "keep them independent from corporate sponsors".
(I laughed a bit and specifically thought of you, @aral... I do agree with you.)
Sadly, it's hard to avoid FOSDEM in some form with so many people pouring so much time and effort into the talks. So I did watch the talks... safely from home.
@aral @nekohayo I wish we had a more ethical, safer, environmentally better*, and most likely distributed alternative to FOSDEM.
(* Most of the traveling to and from FOSDEM is highly polluting. Many people fly over from all over the world.)
I guess a few smaller "conferences" probably targeted on a few topics throughout the year and hosted on the Internet might work? With meet and greets? Perhaps with smaller in-person spinoff events too? Some of which can be done async as well?
@garrett @nekohayo (And yes, we can organise such an event. In fact, I organised just such an international conference about 16 years ago* – as far as I know, it was the first of its kind; fully online multi-day with local hubs. I had to build a custom app in Flash at the time. Would be much easier today and could be organised in a decentralised fashion too.) :)
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/singularity-the-first-large-scale-online-web-conference-is-unveiled/
@aral @nekohayo Oh! Super cool!
I'm happy there are at least *some* virtual conferences still, like https://creativefreedomsummit.com/ (which happened recently). It has sponsors, but exclusively those who build and use the FOSS tools talked about — not VCs and not spy companies.
(Last year, it was even all Element + Jitsi + Peertube, although this year Peertube had a technical issue and had to fall back to YouTube for the live stream. They have been posting archives to https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/creativefreedom/videos though.)
