FOSDEM2026-devroom-declarative-and-minimalistic-computing-cfp
We are excited to announce the Call for Participation for the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing devroom at FOSDEM 2026, which will take place on Sunday, 1 February 2026 (half-day, morning) at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. The submission deadline for talk proposals is 1 December 2025.
FOSDEM is one of the most important free software conferences in the world and is held annually in Brussels. This year’s edition will again be an in-person event, bringing together thousands of contributors and enthusiasts from around the globe.
Our devroom welcomes talks exploring languages, systems, and approaches that strive for simplicity, robustness, and security through declarative and minimalistic design. We’re interested in projects and ideas that reduce complexity, minimize hardware and software dependencies, and promote transparent, understandable computing systems.
Examples include (but are not limited to) projects from the Scheme/Lisp family, Guile, Lua, Nim, Racket, Raku, Forth, and Tcl, as well as experimental systems that push minimalism and declarative design in new directions.
Minimalism and declarative programming are two important topics 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 conference we encourage speakers to honor individuals in computing from a diversity perspective. Individuals who have inspired them and whose work is relevant to their presentations.
If you are developing or researching systems, languages, or tools that embrace declarative or minimalistic principles, we invite you to submit a proposal. We especially encourage submissions from individuals and communities underrepresented in free and open-source software.
If you have something you’d like to share with your fellow developers, please E-mail us! Reach out to pjotr.public456@thebird.nl or manolis837@gmail.com if you run into any trouble.
The deadline for submission is December 1st, 2025. Proposals must be submitted on FOSDEM's conference management system: <https://pretalx.fosdem.org/>. All submissions must go through pretalx: <https://fosdem.org/submit>
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
To see what a final talk looks like see
https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/gnumes/
Let's make this a fun day!
Organizers
- Pjotr Prins (pjotr.public456@thebird.nl) - Manolis Ragkousis (manolis837@gmail.com) - Bonface Munyoki (me@bonfacemunyoki.com) - Jonathan McHugh (indieterminacy@libre.brussels) - Arun Isaac (arunisaac@systemreboot.net) - Amirouche Boubekki (amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com) - Hisham Muhammad (hisham@gobolinux.org) - Ludovic Courtès (ludo@gnu.org) - GNU Guile, GNU Guix - Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke@gnu.org) - GNU Mes project leader - William Byrd (webyrd@gmail.com) - Oliver Propst (oliver.propst@gmail.com) - Julien Lepiller (julien@lepiller.eu)
Code of conduct
- https://fosdem.org/2026/practical/conduct/
Original proposal
- https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FOSDEM2026-devroom-proposal
Important dates
- Dec 1st 2025: submission deadline for talk proposals - Dec 15th 2025: announcement of the final schedule - Sunday, 1 February 2026: FOSDEM!
