Good news: it appears that Jack Dorsey’s FOSDEM talk has been cancelled!
This is a follow up to two earlier posts, which you can read here: one and two.
I say it “appears” so, because there has been no official statement from anyone to that effect. There has also been no communication from staff to the protest organizers, including to our email reaching out as requested to discuss fire safety and crowd control concerns with the staff. The situation is a bit unclear, but… we’ll extend FOSDEM the benefit of the doubt, and with it our gratitude. From all of the volunteers who have been organizing this protest action, we extend our heartfelt thanks to the staff for reconsidering the decision to platform Dorsey and Block, Inc. at FOSDEM. All of us – long-time FOSDEM volunteers, speakers, devroom organizers, and attendees – are relieved to know that FOSDEM stands for our community’s interests.
More importantly: what comes next?
The frustration the community felt at learning that Block was sponsoring FOSDEM and one of the keynote slots1 had been given to Dorsey and his colleagues uncovered some deeper frustrations with the way FOSDEM is run these days. This year is FOSDEM’s 25th anniversary, and it seems sorely overdue for graduating from the “trust us, it’s crazy behind the scenes” governance model to something more aligned with the spirit of open source.
We trust the FOSDEM organizers — we can extend them the benefit of the doubt when they tell us that talk selection is independent of sponsorships. But it strains our presumption of good faith when the talk proposal was rejected by 3 of the 4 independent reviewers and went through anyway. And it’s kind of weird that we have to take them at their word — that the talk selection process isn’t documented anywhere publicly, nor the conflict of interest policy, nor the sponsorship terms, nor almost anything at all about how FOSDEM operates or is governed internally. Who makes decisions? How? We don’t know, and that’s kind of weird for something so important in the open source space.
Esther Payne, a speaker at FOSDEM 2020, summed up these concerns:
Why do we have so little information on the FOSDEM site about the budget and just how incorporated is FOSDEM as an organisation? How do the laws of Belgium affect the legalities of the organisation? How is the bank account administrated? How much money goes into the costs of this year, and how much of the budget goes into startup costs for the next year?
Peter Zaitsev, a long-time devroom organizer and FOSDEM speaker for many years, asked similar questions last year. I’ve spoken to the volunteers who signed up for the protest – we’re relieved that Dorsey’s talk has been cancelled, but we’re still left with big questions about transparency and governance at FOSDEM.
So, what’s next?
Let’s do something useful with that now-empty time slot in Janson. Anyone who planned to attend the protest is encouraged to come anyway on Sunday at 12:00 PM, where we’re going to talk amongst ourselves and anyone else who shows up about what we want from FOSDEM in the future, and what a transparent and participatory model of governance would look like. We would be thrilled if anyone on the FOSDEM staff wants to join the conversation as well, assuming their busy schedule permits. We’ll prepare a summary of our discussion and our findings to submit to the staff and the FOSDEM community for consideration after the event.
Until then – I’ll see you there!
P.S. It’s a shame we won’t end up handing out our pamphlets. The volunteers working on that came up with this amazing flyer and I think it doesn’t deserve to go unseen:
We will be doing a modest print run for posterity — find one of us at FOSDEM if you want one.
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Later moved to the main track, same time, same room, before it was ultimately cancelled. ↩︎