[PublicPolicy] CfP - Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2021

Alexander Sander alex.sander at fsfe.org
Fri Dec 11 07:59:28 UTC 2020


Hi all,

The Pre-FOSDEM events in the recent years have been highly successful
thanks to your contributions. Now we will go one step further:
integrate our fruitful exchange directly into FOSDEM! We are therefore
pleased to announce that we will co-organise the upcoming Legal and
Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2021.

Unfortunately, next year's FOSDEM will still have to take place online,
so we will not be able to meet in person. But we are convinced that we
can address important issues in the digital format and also network.

We are therefore looking forward to your exciting submissions, here you
will find the CfP:
https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2020q4/003145.html


###########################################################################

        Call For Participation
        Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2021

CONFERENCE DATE:   Saturday & Sunday 6-7 February 2021 in Brussels,
                   Belgium
DEVROOM DATE:      Saturday 6 February 2021
CFP DEADLINE:      Sunday 20 December 2020 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on
                   Earth)
SPEAKERS NOTIFIED: Sunday 5 January 2021 (on or before)

Quick CFP Overview (TL;DR)
==========================

Hackers, developers, contributors and lawyers alike are encouraged to
submit on any FOSS-related policy or legal topic.

We seek proposals for 30 or 50 minute talks that address issues of
software freedom project policies and legal issues that extend
beyond and/or are orthogonal to technical issues faced by projects.
For ideas about talk topics see the background information below.

You can respond to this CFP by creating a user account on Pentabarf
and creating one (or more) talk proposals by 20 December 2020.
See details below.


CFP Details
===========

Copyright law provides many of the basic legal underpinnings of Free
Software. Patent and trademark law and legal frameworks relating to
data privacy and security also have significant relevance to Free
Software development. Governance and policies around free software
projects (beyond mere outbound licensing) set the rules for
collaboration and can be critical to a project's success. Also
governments, institutions and administrations increasingly rely on
Free Software and regulate and govern this area.

Our community has substantial expertise in this area yet there are
few venues to discuss these matters in a forum open to all. Hackers,
developers, contributors, lawyers, policy experts, and community
leaders all possess expertise in these matters.

This DevRoom seeks proposals for 30 or 50 minute talks. Sessions should
address issues of software freedom project policies and legal issues
that extend beyond and/or are orthogonal to technical issues faced by
projects and government regulations. Such topics could include, but
aren't necessarily limited to:

  * What legislation should we be watching, what has been recently
    enacted, and what coming soon? What effect could these have on
    software freedom?

  * Who controls the copyright, trademark, or patent licensing, release
    plans, CLA administration, or security bug reporting policies of
    your project, and why? What challenges have you faced in these
    policy areas and how are you seeking to change it?

  * How is your project governed? Do you have a non-profit organization,
    or a for-profit company that primarily controls your project, or
    neither?  Do you wish your project governance was different?  Who
    decided your governance initially?  What politics (good and bad)
    have occurred around your governance choices and how have you
    changed your policy?  Does your project have a "shadow governance",
    whereby technical governance is open and fair, but some entity has
    its own opaque political structure that influences your project?
    Are you worried that your project might and you don't know? Are you
    exploring any new solutions for governance?

  * How do ethical issues intersect with your project? How do those
    issues interact with software freedom? How can we protect user's
    rights in the current legal and technical landscape? Are there ways
    to mitigate the hold that click through terms of service have over
    the average person's use of software? Are privacy regulations like
    GDPR having any appreciable impact on software freedom?

  * Legal topics of all sorts and their interaction with software
    freedom culture and work remain welcome, and could include: How does
    your project make use of legal advice?  What legal advice do you
    give projects and what topics do you put first on the list to worry
    about in projects?  Discuss in detail a legal and/or policy issue
    your project faced and how your community dealt with it. What
    lessons did you learn?  Are some of your developers afraid to
    discuss legal or quasi-legal issues without their lawyers, or their
    employers' lawyers, present? How has that impeded or helped your
    project? Are your lawyers really your lawyers (e.g., do corporate
    lawyers for companies in your community influence the direction of
    the project even though not all contributors work for that company)?

  * Contribution and engagement policies: how does your project engage
    new contributors and what policy decisions did your project make to
    welcome new contributors?  What legal issues or policy concerns has
    your project faced historically in its community engagement efforts,
    and what did you learn from these experiences?

  * How does money affect your community? How is funding of developers
    handled in your project?  What policies do you set to welcome
    volunteers to join a community where most developers are paid? Does
    your project have policies that forbid funding developers directly?
    Does reliance on volunteer labor lead to lack of diversity since
    only the affluent can participate? If you had unconstrained
    resources at your disposal, what would you change about the funding
    structure of your project? Given the resources you have, what have
    you tried to change?  Have you succeeded or failed? Would more
    money in the ecosystem hurt or help your project?

  * How do projects handle conflicts of interest and make sure
    that relevant interests of contributors are disclosed in important
    decision making discussions?

  * Strategies and plans for addressing harassment, exclusionary and/or
    discriminatory behavior in FLOSS communities. Do you have a Code
    of Conduct? Have you needed to enforce it?  Was it successful in
    improving behavior and diversity in your community? What strategies
    do you use to you handle toxic people in your community?

  * Talks on license compliance, licensing business models, and anything
    akin to, or building upon, what you've seen in our DevRoom before
    are of course welcome. (URLs to talks from previous years are
    below.)

Regarding topic relevancy, here's the only "don't": please don't propose
introductory talks; there are other venues appropriate for those.
FOSDEM is the meeting place of experts in Free Software
project governance, law, and policy. This DevRoom is for intermediate
to advanced topics surrounding just about anything you might call a
"legal" or "policy" issue for your project or software freedom!

Should I Submit?
================

Do consider that what may seem elementary to you may in fact be
an intermediate topic in this area. In particular, while we expect to
receive submissions from lawyers, we've found in our careers that
non-lawyers often know just as much (and often more) about these topics than
lawyers. Developers and other Free Software project participants who
regularly face complex policy and legal questions are strongly and
particularly encouraged to submit proposals. Historically, some of the
most lively and intriguing talks in this DevRoom's previous years have
been from developers who have been thrust (often due to circumstances
beyond their control) into dealing with legal and policy issues for Free
Software.

Look at past talks in our DevRoom for inspiration:
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/legal_and_policy_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/legal_issues/
   https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/legal_issues_devroom.html

CFP Schedule And Submission Details
===================================

Submit proposals NO LATER THAN 20 December 2020 at 23:59 AoE
(Anywhere on Earth)

Please use the following URL to submit your talk to FOSDEM 2021:
  https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21

and follow these steps:

  * Select as the Track "Legal and Policy Issues devroom".

  * Include a title. (Note that "Subtitle" entry doesn't appear on
    all conference documents, so make sure "Title" can stand on its
    own without "Subtitle" present.) Shorter and more concise is better!

  * Include an Abstract of about 500 characters and a full description
    of any length you wish, but in both fields, please be concise, but
    clear and descriptive.

  * Indicate a 30 or 50 minute time slot. If you select any other time
    amount, your submission is very likely to be rejected.

  * Use the "Links" sub-area to your past work in the field you'd like
    to share. Particularly helpful are recordings (audio/video) of
    your past talks on the subject or past papers/blog posts you've
    written on the subject.

  * You are encouraged to enter biographic information under the
    "Person" section (e.g. you may upload an image, enter your
    background in the "Description" tab, and sites of interest
    under the "Links" tab).

  * State that you agree to CC BY-SA-4.0 or CC BY-4.0 licensing of your
    talk in the "Submission Notes" field. Add a statement such as this:

       "Should my presentation be scheduled for FOSDEM 2021, I hereby
        agree to license all recordings, slides and any other
        materials presented under the Creative Commons Attribution
        ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

  * Also in the notes field, confirm your availability to speak on
    Saturday, 6 February 2021. (Please indicate any challenges you
    may have with respect to your availability to present during the
    European time zone.)

Failure to follow these instructions above (and those on the FOSDEM
2021 site) may result in automatic rejection of your talk submission.
However, if you have trouble with submission via the official system,
please do contact <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us> for assistance.

Diversity Statement
-------------------

The organizers of this DevRoom are committed to increasing the
diversity of the free software movement. To that end, our CFP process
takes demographic information into account in order to build a program
that features as many different voices and perspectives as possible.
If you are comfortable doing so, please share any demographic
information about yourself in the "Submission Notes". Such disclosure
is not mandatory by any means.

No Assurance of Acceptance
--------------------------

The organizers (listed below) realize many of our friends and
colleagues will respond to this CFP. We welcome submissions from all,
but an invitation from any of us to submit is *not* an assurance of
acceptance. We typically must make hard decisions. We appreciate
the effort you put into crafting your submission to give yourself the
best chance of acceptance.


About the DevRoom Organizers
============================

The co-organizers of the FOSDEM 2021 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom are
(in alphabetical order by surname):

- Richard Fontana, Senior Commercial Counsel, Red Hat

- Matthias Kirschner, President, Free Software Foundation Europe

- Bradley M. Kuhn, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software
Freedom Conservancy

- Alexander Sander, FSFE Policy Coordinator

- Karen M. Sandler, Executive Director of the Software Freedom
Conservancy, Adjunct Lecturer-In-Law Columbia Law School

You are welcome to contact us all at <fosdem-legal-policy at faif.us>
with questions about this CFP.

###########################################################################


Best

Alex


-- 
Alexander Sander - EU Public Policy Programme Manager
Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-157 923 472 12
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030  |   (fsfe.org/join)



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