layout: event title: “Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2026” date: 2025-10-01 categories: design conference open-source eventDate: 31 January & 1 February 2026 location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium time: TBC CET status: future permalink: /2025/10/01/fosdem-cfp-2026
FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the success of open source design at previous FOSDEM’s, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 31 January & 1 February 2026.
Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for over a decade now! giving designers who work with or contribute to free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) a platform to share their ideas. Much like the previous years, Open Source Design is applying for a devroom at FOSDEM 2026 and will update this article if and when we are accepted and also what day/times we have for the open source design devroom.
Open Source Design has limited fund to support travel, accomodation and expenses for speakers and can be found on our open collective page. We will be prioritising under-represented members of the FOSS community with these travel funds and can offer invitation letters for visas.
We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!
“Design” can mean anything including typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience, human-computer interaction, accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, service design, user research, design research and more. You don’t have to be an expert in the field – you could have been involved in a project for as little as a year or as long as a decade. As long as you have been involved with design in any respect in an open source project, we’re interested to hear what you think!
Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:
Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!
Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System Laurel Terlesky at FOSDEM 2025
CLI Design for Designers and DevelopersHartmut Obendorf at FOSDEM 2025
The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source ProjectsKhushi Garg at FOSDEM 2025
Reimagining Personal Computing with E ink: Community Insights and Design Challenges by Alexander Soto at FOSDEM 2024
Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt by nojhan at FOSDEM 2024
Bad UX is Bad Security: Adventures in Qubes OS UX Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka at FOSDEM 2024
Penpot 2.0 is here! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz at FOSDEM 2024
Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023
Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022
Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020
In 2026, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom would be in-person and recorded/streamed. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’.
Submissions open as soon as we get the approval for our devroom in October/November 2025.
Talk submissions will be sent directly to FOSDEM’s Pretalx system. Submissions for talks must select ‘Open Source Design’ under ‘Track’.
There the Open Source Design Core Maintainer team will review talks and accept and reject. We should have space for around 6 talks in the afternoon.
Submission of talks must be done by the end of November 2025
Accepted talks would be announced latest in December 2025.
All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.
Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.