FOSDEM2021-devroom-declarative-and-minimalistic-computing

We are excited to announce a devroom on Declarative and Minimalistic Computing at FOSDEM on Sunday February 7th 2021, online!

FOSDEM is one of the most important free software conferences and is hosted annually at Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. Unfortunately this year FOSDEM will not run a physical conference but will be online only. Talks will be pre-recorded with some live content including Q&A sessions and discussion panels.

We accept talks from languages that attempt to minimize use of hardware and software while try to make systems simpler, more robust and more secure. If you are working on improving today's systems taking declarative/minimalistic approaches feel free to submit a talk proposal. Examples are Scheme/Lisp family of programmings languages.

Minimalism and declarative programming are two important topic 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 virtual conference we will honour the late Professor Edsger Dijkstra as a pioneer who laid foundations for many of these ideas.

We have a room Sunday 6 February 2021. We want to invite you to submit a talk on declarative and minimalistic computing that fits that description. We are especially happy to receive talk submissions from members of groups underrepresented in free software.

If you have something you’d like to share with your fellow developers, please E-mail us! Talks considered for the devroom will have to be entered in

 - https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21

The deadline for submission is December 15th. If you have a FOSDEM pentabarf account from a previous year, please use that account. Otherwise add one on https://penta.fosdem.org/user/new_account. Reach out to pjotr.public456@thebird.nl or manolis837@gmail.com if you run into any trouble.

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
 * Presentations has to be pre-recorded and streamed before the event.
 * Start recording early!

To see what a final talk looks like see

 https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/gnumes/

For accepted talks

 * Once your talk was accepted, we will assign you an organiser to help you to produce the pre-recorded content.
 * The organiser will review the content and ensure it has the required quality. He is also responsable to ensure the content is into the system and ready to broadcast.
 * During the stream of your talk, you must be available online for the Q/A session

Let's make this a fun day!

Organisers

Manolis Ragkousis, Ludovic Courtès, Jan Nieuwenhuizen, Pjotr Prins (pjotr.public456@thebird.nl), William Byrd, Ricardo Wurmus, Alex Sassmannshausen, Amirouche Boubekki, Efraim Flashner, Bonface M. K.

Code of conduct

 - https://fosdem.org/2021/practical/conduct/

Original proposal

 - https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FOSDEM2021-devroom-proposal

Important dates:

 - Dec 15th 2020:  submission deadline for talk proposals
 - Dec 31th 2020:  announcement of the final schedule
 - Jan 14th 2020:  submission deadline for recordings
 - Feb  6th 2021:  FOSDEM!