Welcome to FOSSTEM 2024.
I'll start with a reminder to be kinder.
We lost quite a few volunteers over the pandemic.
We lost muscle memory. We lost stuff. We lost everything.
Last year was pretty rough in the background.
From what I've heard, it was not super noticeable for the attendees, which was nice.
But still there were a few words.
We hope that we are basically almost back to pre-pandemic levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
We'll see. But if something breaks, ideally tell Infodesk about it and just move on.
Can't do anything else anyway.
Speaking of losing a lot of hands, please volunteer.
As of right now, we still have plenty of opportunities for volunteering open.
You'll find a bunch of QR codes so you can just take photos of the thing if you want to and you'll have everything.
We still need more hands to help.
As per usual, if you help with cleanup, A, any of the network cable, which is not that much anymore,
because we have been pretty good at using UB infrastructure these days,
any network cable which you take out under all supervision you can keep.
I'm going to repeat this in the closing talk.
Also, there is food for everyone who stays until the end.
Historically, sometimes this went until midnight.
But the last few years, we were always done-ish at 10, and more hands, more better.
So if you are around and if you have time, please help.
If you need help yourself, well, yellow shirts or jackets mean Steph.
Blue shirts mean deaf room managers.
Those are the people who basically run the conference in a conference in the various rooms.
Green shirts are video team.
There are a few back there.
You also see orange shirts, which are general purpose volunteers for all the things.
Speaking of not everything being super smoothly just now,
the supplier didn't send all the t-shirts which we ordered, and we noticed too late.
So a long story short, we don't have enough of the shirts.
As you can see, I'm wearing a black one, not a yellow one.
So not every volunteer might have a shirt.
If in doubt, given the benefit of the doubt, they are probably a volunteer if they claim so.
This is ULB. This is not according to True North.
You see True North down below, but also we have the navigation.
If you need to go around, this is way, way better than just five years ago when we didn't have this,
and everyone got lost all the time.
So those QR codes all now go into this precise system if you need anything.
From a t-shirt or a hoodie, if you want to have a printed map, if you want to give us a donation,
if you just want to say hi and thanks, whatever Infodesk is your main landing spot,
as per usual, extra large, extra small might be gone sooner than later,
so going there sooner than later might be good.
We are also on Matrix, and you can also email us at all times,
and all of those are monitored, not 24-7, but almost.
So this is the difference between last year and this year,
and there is more than a person a week of work between those two photos,
and more than 10K in investment.
So as a reminder for those who don't know,
we have on the FOSTA network, it is IPv6 only on the Wi-Fi,
and it is net6.4 and DNS6.4, so all the translation to IPv4 happens for you automatically,
except for, I believe it was ripe, we are the first conference to actually do this,
and we found a bunch of bugs.
Learning in the public, full transparency, we just found a bug in internal Grafana tooling with IPv6.
Anyway, so primarily use this network please,
and if you maintain any software and something breaks, this is great, of course now you can fix it.
At the same time, if you want the more legacy taste of internet in your devices,
you can use the dual stack one, and you will get full IPv4.
But we have been doing this for years, it is pretty stable, just try it,
and you will just see, hey, this IPv6 stuff actually works.
We also have a lightning talk, or longer than a lightning talk in the infrastructure view, as per usual,
the QR code goes there, and as a reminder, because we have funny people who think they are funny when they try and attack stuff,
A, we are going to find you and shut you down, but B, please encrypt all your traffic,
because some people are just maybe not as nice as they should be.
Social interactions, well, hallway track, that is the main thing while we are here at FOSTA,
because we can't get into the rooms anyway.
There is also lots of new joiners, because as you would have loved.
Anyway, we have Matrix as the primary thing, we also have IRC with reasonable effort,
but there is no bridge this year, if you don't know what that means, doesn't matter,
just go to Matrix, long story short, yeah.
Also, go to Mustadon and look at stuff.
If you need to register for, well, Brain's Matrix on, chat FOSTA or you click on the upper left,
and then on the create account and you are done.
If you want to toot about those things, which you see, ideally with consent of the people who are in the picture,
use the hashtag FOSTA, there is our main account, we also have other social media,
but we try to ignore this, so that's the main one.
You will find this with the QR code.
Anyone who doesn't want to be in the picture now is a good time to hide your face,
and everyone else just raise your hands for a second and say hi.
Those are going to be posted on Mustadon in a few.
So, schedule.
You probably know this, but this is the schedule, it builds dynamically,
but we are pretty much settled, but if any deaf room manager needs to still change something,
someone fell sick, whatever, it will update within minutes,
so this is the absolute source of truth for everything regarding schedule.
And I still don't think anyone told us about an Apple-compatible thing for the...
There is one? Okay.
Can you send us to info at FOSTA, so next time I can put this on the slides?
Thank you.
Just say Ritchie H or 2Ritchie H and it will find its way.
Thank you.
So, the stats, we have even more events crammed into these old buildings.
We have even more speakers.
We do have more tracks and deaf rooms, but I forgot the old number, so you don't see the diff.
We managed to cram even more stands into the building
and maybe we will be able to do even more next year.
We don't yet know, because we are always out of space, as you know, and fewer lighting talks.
These are all the deaf rooms.
You won't be reading all of those right now, but just to give you a rough idea of scale,
this is only page one, this is page two.
And for those who don't know, yes, this is the largest open source conference on Earth.
We have a bunch of stands.
We rejuggled them quite a bit.
So, if you are walking to that place there for the last three or five years, you always saw that one thing.
Look online.
Some of them didn't make it, but most we just rejuggled them and tried to organize them with a new system.
So, there might just be somewhere else.
Yeah.
We don't have a hacker room this year.
We needed this for basically for staff and for boxes of stuff.
So, please go to the cafeteria in the main, or next to the food area in the main campus.
Please don't go into the old room.
Even if you know where the old room is, please just go.
Don't go in there, because there's going to be people in there who are working and trying to make FOSTA happen.
So, yeah, please don't.
Speaking of being nice about things, when, not if, you need to queue here, because you will need to queue.
Please form an orderly queue.
Don't skip, blah, blah, blah, the usual, but also don't block any of the pathways and don't block any of the fire exits.
We are literally filling this campus to capacity and maybe a little bit to breaking capacity.
So, please try and keep the pathways free.
If staff and volunteers come with requests or instructions or, hey, this is a fire hazard or whatever, please don't discuss.
Just do it, because they probably have a good reason why they do it, why they tell you.
If staff or volunteers are running, make way.
We are not running often, but when we are running, we mean it, so please just make way.
In the food queue, please consider letting people skip ahead if they have one of the color-coded t-shirts,
but also if you have one of those, don't abuse it and don't use it when you actually would have time.
Also happens sometimes.
It goes both ways.
The one exception, we are doing food runs for the actual teams which are stuck in rooms all day, like myself,
and those, we will just skip the queue and go to the front.
If you see this sign, you saw a green one on the sides or on the doors as you came in, which was nice.
All of them on the back have this one.
If there is a sign that the room is full, that means the room is full.
It does not mean that because you have a really good reason and really wanted to see that one talk
and your friend is speaking, you can sneak in.
It means the room is full.
This sucks, but it means the room is full.
Maybe it's going to work this time, but please, that sign means do not enter.
Also if you try to open the door, sometimes they are a little bit broken,
but if you try to open the door and someone pulls back, that means the volunteer has a reason why the door is currently closed.
Usually of course it's super loud inside.
Maybe also I should have put this there.
When you leave and enter a building, please don't talk and try to not bump the chairs and everything.
It's incredibly loud up front and also quite a few defferums try to optimize for Q&A,
but this means the audience needs to be quiet while entering and leaving.
I know it's unusual, but those buildings are super, super, super loud, in particular for anyone up front.
This is literally built to echo everything from me up to you, but also everything from you down to me.
It's super loud and this is true for quite a few buildings.
So please be quiet when entering and leaving.
I need to put this on the slides for next year.
If you have any feedback, send it there.
We don't get enough feedback.
If you say nice things, that's also appreciated.
That happens almost never.
If you want to say crazy things, maybe don't, but anything you want to send us, send us, we like reading your stuff and we read everything.
If you need first aid, we have one first aid station in K Building on the second level
and for most of the entryways to the second level, it would be on the right end of the thing
or if you're the one end and then it's at the other end, if you don't see it.
There's also the net link here.
I'm just going to wait a little bit longer for people to take a picture of this slide,
because if you need it, you will need it, so now is a good time to take a picture of this.
We also have both professional security and the rec course walking around campus randomly,
like they have their own schedule and everything.
They are the professionals, we are not.
If you need anything, go there.
A bit about health and safety.
You hear the coughing all around of you.
Some of you are sick right now, some with COVID.
Some of you will fall sick while here and some of you will fall sick at home.
If you are currently infected, ideally go home.
At the same time, I recognize that this might be harsh if you're only coughing,
but in this case, please just wear a mask.
We have free masks at the infodesk.
I also see a few people with masks here.
You will also see me with a mask when I'm not talking about stuff.
Also for the first-timers and for those who might not have been here so often,
Fostem Flue, Chaos Grippe, Oktoberfest, those are mass spreader events.
A statistically significant amount of people will come home sick.
Done. Plain statistics in science.
You can get sick if you want to, but maybe don't.
This is the Mozilla death room.
I saw this on Masteron, not on any other social network, which is nice.
The left one is 20 years ago, 2004, I think they said,
and they are almost in the same place by pure accident this year.
The wall changed color, but beyond this it's the same.
Why am I bringing this up?
Well, next year we will have the 25.
So, if you have old shirts, which you have from as old as possible, ideally,
please do bring them.
Even if they don't fit, still bring them.
Someone might be able to wear them, or you can just pull them over your belly,
or maybe you slim down so much so you can just get a second person into the shirt,
depending which way it went.
But please bring the old stuff.
If you have an old hoodie, if you have an old sweater,
if you have this one project shirt from like ages ago, whatever.
Bring the old stuff.
We are going to figure something out for next year.
Maybe take a picture here or outside, or we'll see.
Most likely Sunday next year, because then we can gorge on Saturday how many people come.
Anyway, if you have anything old, which you think might be nice on a photo, bring it.
We also have a code of conduct, and we followed a code of conduct both ways.
Anything which happens, I need to put a QR code here, just realized.
Yeah, this is the code of conduct. Please read it, but the short version is nice.
Anything happens, conducted for StemOrc.
If anything is really like currently ongoing, there is a cell phone,
and the cell phone is going to wake people up.
So anything really bad happens, call this number, and wake whoever, poor soul.
Probably Michael is currently carrying this thing.
Or anyone who has a yellow shirt, well, with stuff on it, or a jacket or something, just go to them.
By proxy, if you can't find someone else in green, blue, or orange shirt,
but primarily ideally go to the yellow shirt, or InfoDesk and K also works.
To the thank yous, to all the volunteers, all the deaf room speakers, all the deaf room managers, all the staff, all everyone. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Also, thank you to all the sponsors.
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If you want to give thanks the other way, donations can be made at InfoDesk in HOK or online.
So for those who don't know, of course, I don't know how many are in...
Oh, for who is this the first foster?
Wow, good!
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So for those who don't know this, we limit the amount of sponsors, basically.
The reason is we don't want to depend on anyone, any one company, or on any long-standing support or anything.
We deliberately finance ourselves substantially through donations and t-shirt sales and things like these.
Well, that's basically it.
So yeah, this is why we call for donations, because we don't want to be depending on the corporate overlords, and like they pull funding or something.
We want this to be a grass-rootsy thing, not only on the organizing side, but also on the financial side.
And thank you!
APPLAUSE
To be clear, also thank you, even if you don't donate.
Also, for those who don't know, it's really loud up here, so even if you just whisper, like two, five, twenty people...
Thank you.
Whispering is super loud.
You cannot imagine how good or bad, depending on your vantage point, these rooms are.
It's insane how loud is up front for the speakers if you even mumble.
Person who's over there on the right.
Yeah, so, have fun, and as always, be excellent to each other.
APPLAUSE
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