- Where: FOSDEM 2027, in person Brussels Belgium, room to be announced
- When: Saturday, 30 January 2027, all day.
- Deadline for submissions: Monday 23 November 2026 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
- Where to submit: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp
- Speakers notified: Wednesday 2 December 2026
- Finalized Schedule: Monday 7 December 2026
Intro
The Legal and Policy dev room invites hackers, developers, contributors, lawyers, and decision-makers alike to share their knowledge with the community. We invite you to contribute to our dev room by submitting proposals for 25 or 50 minutes talks or panels about software freedom related legal or policy topics on intermediate to advanced level (due to the expected audience please do not submit introductory talks). In case you have any questions about how to contribute to the sharing of knowledge in our dev room, please do not hesitate to contact us at <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us>.
You can respond to this CfP on or before 23 November 2026. Look at past talks in our DevRoom for inspiration:
- https://archive.fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/legal/
- https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/legal-and-policy/
- https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/legal/
- https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
- https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
Inclusion Statement
The organizers of this DevRoom are committed to increasing the diversity of the free software movement. To that end, our CfP process takes demographic information into account in order to build a program that features as many different voices and perspectives as possible. If you are comfortable doing so, please share any demographic information about yourself in the "Submission Notes". Such disclosure is not mandatory by any means.
No Assurance of Acceptance
The organizers (listed below) realize many of our friends and colleagues will respond to this CfP. We welcome submissions from all, but an invitation from any of us to submit is not an assurance of acceptance. We typically must make hard decisions. We appreciate the effort you put into crafting your submission to give yourself the best chance of acceptance.
Submitting a proposal
- Go to FOSDEM's pretalx site: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp
- Select the track "Legal and Policy"
- Include a title. Shorter and more concise is better!
- Include an Abstract of about 500 characters and a full description of any length you wish, but please be concise, clear and descriptive.
- Indicate a 25 or 50 minute time slot. We will likely reserve 50 minute time slots for panels.
- State that you agree to CC BY-SA-4.0 or CC BY-4.0 licensing of your talk in the "Submission Notes" field. Add a statement such as this: "Should my presentation be scheduled for FOSDEM 2027, I agree to license all recordings, slides and any other materials presented under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International license."
About the DevRoom Organizers
The co-organizers of the FOSDEM 2027 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom are (in alphabetical order by surname):
- Richard Fontana - Principal Commercial Counsel, Red Hat
- Matthias Kirschner, President, Free Software Foundation Europe
- Bradley M. Kuhn, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy
- Tom Marble, Chief Technology Officer, Informatique, Inc.
- Alexander Sander, FSFE Senior Policy Consultant
- Karen M. Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, Lecturer-In-Law, Columbia Law School
You are welcome to contact us all at <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us> with questions about this CFP.