Laura and I are continuing our interview series with the FOSDEM Community DevRoom speakers on why they submitted their particular talk, thoughts on their ideal audience members and what else they plan to see at the conference. If you missed the first four posts, they’re linked at the end of this one!

We hope to see you in the Community DevRoom in Building K, room K.4.601 from 10:30 to 19:00 on Saturday, 3 February. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend. (And yes, we have a much bigger room this year!)

Riccardo Iaconelli on Italy: The most hacker-friendly country?

Riccardo Iaconelli

I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Riccardo, but I’m really looking forward to hearing all about his work on the Italian government’s Digital Transformation Team. They are “building hackerspaces throughout the country and turning all developers paid with public money into open source contributors.” Even better, this team is “working to spread this idea throughout all of Europe.”

Riccardo let us know that the ideal audience member for his talk is “someone who wants to know more about open practices in the government…. [M]aybe somebody…who wants to have an inspiration and replicate what we are doing, maybe some hacker who likes the idea and wants to hack on our general purpose code to push digital public services in [their] country as well.” Along with visiting Community DevRoom, Riccardo is looking forward to spending some time in the hallway track, so please come find him and share your ideas for open government and how free software can serve society!

You can follow Ricardo’s adventures on Twitter: @ruphy (Did we mention he’s an open government advocate and a physicist?)

Kevin P. Fleming on Software Philanthropy for Everyone

Kevin P. Fleming

Kevin is an open source developer, a Member of the CTO’s Office at Bloomberg focusing on open technology initiatives, and yet another speaker I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting in person! He’s spoken at previous FOSDEM’s in the Legal and Policy DevRoom, but this year he’ll be sharing his insights on helping large companies focus their philanthropic activities – such as charitable foundations operated by the company – on supporting free and open source software projects. He’ll also talk about how you can use your employer’s donor matching programs to support your favorite FLOSS projects. As someone who has regularly asked that my employer match my personal donations to libre software projects, I cannot recommend this practice highly enough. (Plus, many thanks to my employer, Red Hat, and my former employer, Google, for matching donations to FOSS non-profits!)

When we asked Kevin why he’s giving this talk, he let us know that he’s “hoping to inspire more companies, and developers at companies, to take advantage of their philanthropy programs to benefit open source projects.” When he’s not in the Community DevRoom, he’ll be in the Legal and Policy DevRoom, since “any open source program manager needs to be involved in both aspects of the equation.”  (I agree, which is why I’ll be in the same place on Sunday!)

You can follow Kevin’s updates from FOSDEM and beyond on Twitter: @realkpfleming

Previous Speaker Interviews

In case you missed them, here are all of our previous FOSDEM 2018 Community DevRoom speaker interviews:

• Volume 1: Deb Nicholson & Mike McQuaid
• Volume 2: Brian Proffitt & Jeremy Garcia
• Volume 3: Rich Sands & Simon Phipps
• Volume 4: Vicky Brasseur & David Moreno Lumbreras

We have more speaker interviews coming, so stay tuned!