FOSSBack – FOSS Backstage 2025

This was FOSS Backstage 2025

FOSS Backstage — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 17:50:25 +0000

The second day of FOSS Backstage has come to an end after two days of insightful sessions and lively conversations.

We would like to thank everyone who joined us for the seventh edition of #FOSSBack.

We welcomed around 270 attendees, onsite and offline, who enjoyed 49 sessions on three stages. Thanks to our streaming platform Venueless, participants from all over the world were able to join us and speakers were able to share their knowledge and ideas from the comfort of their own homes.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the speakers for their amazing and insightful talks, panels and workshops!

Thanks to the fantastic tech team at Covalent and our recording partner, Mercedes Benz Tech Innovation, we will be uploading all the sessions to our YouTube channel by the end of next week.

Other highlights of our programme included our Get-Together on day one, kindly sponsored by Grafana Labs, and our Lightning Talks session, hosted by Kris Freedain, where we enjoyed six 5-minute presentations on various topics. Recordings of the Lightning Talks session will also be uploaded to our YouTube channel next week. We would like to thank everyone who submitted their ideas and of course Kris Freedain for his wonderful moderation.

On day two, we started the day with the FOSS eGov Breakfast, which brought together professionals from public and private institutions who are working on digitizing public administration. The gathering was co-organized by NEGZ and FOSS Backstage and was sponsored by Nextcloud, element and Univention.

Thanks to our breakfast partner, Bitergia, attendees were able to enjoy delicious breakfast snacks such as croissants and fresh food, and thanks to our drinks partner, Search Guard, water, tea, coffee and soft drinks were available throughout the conference.

Helping Hands are the heart of FOSS Backstage. We would like to thank each and every one of our volunteers for their fantastic support: Federica Nocerino, Celeste Horgan, Erick Rea, Heike Quosdorf, Nasser Kaze, Jarek Potiuk, Barbara Fischer, Malte Dik, Alin Jerpelea, Patrick Muluh Penn, Tejas Shah and Ania Sroka.

FOSS Backstage would not be possible without the great support of our partners. We would like to thank our recording partner Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation, our community partners Google, The Linux Foundation, Landeshauptstadt München IT-Referat, OpenSearch, Open Source Collective, Sentry, our Get-Together partner Grafana Labs, our drinks partner Search Guard, our breakfast partner Bitergia, the FOSS eGoV breakfast partner element, Nextcloud, Univention, our newsletter partner pwc and our media partners Linux Magazine, Open Source JobHub, Linux Professional Institute and IT-Schulungen.com.

FOSS Backstage 2025 was co-funded by the European Union and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

We would also like to thank the people at Covalent, especially Florian Baron and Johannes Waltermann, for their amazing recording work and for overcoming every technical challenge for us. Last but not least we would like to thank the venue bUm for their great cooperation.

A very special thank you to our photographer – Jan Michalko. We upload all photos to our flickr account.

Preparations for the next edition of FOSS Backstage will be underway this autumn! If you don’t want to miss any updates, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon and subscribe to our newsletter!

We look forward to seeing you all again next year in Berlin or online.

All the best,

Alex, Paul, Sven & Anne

PS: We are always looking for ways to improve FOSS Backstage: If you haven’t already, please participate in our feedback survey. You can also reach out to us directly with any feedback about the conference, or ideas for improvement, at info@foss-backstage.de.

FOSS Backstage Day 1!

FOSS Backstage — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:56:15 +0000

We kicked off the first day of FOSS Backstage with our keynote speaker Jutta Horstmann on “Digital Sovereignty and Open Source – Shaping an answer to geopolitical instabilities“. Jutta introduced ZenDiS, its platform (openCode), products (openDesk and more) and services for the public sector, and shared ZenDiS’s experience in cross-national collaboration.

Participants could enjoy 24 sessions across three stages. Recordings of our sessions will be uploaded to our YouTube channel by the end of next week.

Our Lightning Talks session at this year’s FOSS Backstage, hosted by Kris Freedain, allowed attendees to share their short ideas, pitches and more about free and open-source software in 5-minute presentations. The recordings will be uploaded to our YouTube channel as well.

We rounded off the day with our Get-Together, enjoying tasty snacks and drinks, kindly sponsored by our partner, Grafana Labs.

Be sure to follow the hashtag “fossback” in the Fediverse to get more impressions from the community!

We look forward to many more insightful sessions and conversations tomorrow on day 2 of FOSS Backstage!

Looking for a FOSS Backstage souvenir? Get your FOSS Backstage T-shirt! (Available at the registration desk in the lobby)

Photos by Jan Michalko

Keynote Announcement & CfP Update

FOSS Backstage — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:30:19 +0000

Jutta Horstmann to Keynote at #fossback25

We are thrilled to announce Jutta Horstmann as our keynote speaker for FOSS Backstage 2025!

Jutta is an entrepreneur, visionary leader and advocate for digital sovereignty, sustainability and open-source software (FOSS). As CEO of ZenDiS GmbH, Jutta is leading efforts to enable public institutions in Germany to achieve digital independence through innovative open-source solutions.

ZenDiS, Germany’s Centre for Digital Sovereignty, often referred to as Germany’s OSPO, aims to strengthen public IT against rising geopolitical threats by promoting open-source alternatives and reducing tech dependencies.

At FOSS Backstage 2025, she will present ZenDiS, its platform (openCode), products (openDesk and more) and services for the public sector, and share ZenDiS’s experience in cross-national collaborations.

CfP Update

We received 165 submissions for the coming edition of FOSS Backstage – a new record!

Our CfP closed yesterday and we would like to thank everyone who submitted a proposal and showed an interest in shaping the FOSS Backstage 2025 programme.

Our Programme Committee will now begin the process of blind-reviewing all submissions to select the most outstanding sessions.

Look out for the final programme announcement in December!

Don’t miss out on our Early Bird Tickets

Take advantage of our Early Bird tickets, available until December 8, and enjoy a discount of over 40% off the regular entry fee.

Get your Ticket here

We look forward to seeing you at FOSS Backstage 2025 on 10-11 March! In the meantime, watch the FOSS Backstage 24 sessions on our YouTube-Channel.

Watch here