In two weeks I’ll be heading to Brussels for FOSDEM 2026! FOSDEM takes place January 31st and February 1st, bringing together over 8,000 developers annually at the ULB Solbosch campus for what is one of the largest gatherings of Free and Open Source enthusiasts in the world. No registration needed, completely free, and organized entirely by volunteers. This is the kind of event that reminds you why open source matters.
The AI Plumbers devroom looks particularly interesting this year. With all the discussions about local inference and self-hosting that I’ve been writing about lately, it will be great to connect with people working on similar challenges. The sessions cover everything from model optimization to practical deployment strategies. Perfect timing as more teams move toward running their own AI infrastructure.
What really caught my attention are the devrooms focused on Europe’s digital sovereignty and open source policy. There’s serious momentum building around public digital infrastructure and how open source fits into EU policy frameworks. These aren’t just theoretical discussions anymore, we’re seeing real implementations and policy decisions that will shape how technology gets developed and deployed across Europe. The intersection of policy, sovereignty, and open source is where some of the most important conversations are happening right now. See the tracks here:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/building-europes-public-digital-infrastructure/
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/open-source-eu-policy/
Looking forward to two days of learning, connecting, and maybe finding some new collaborators. See you in Brussels!
About me
I work since more than 20 years as a developer, product manager and AI lead with language technologies. Starting with speech recognition and machine translation I now focus on education in semantic technologies and LLMs.
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