FOSDEM is one of the most remarkable events for free software and opensource developers, advocates, humans, and robots.

The event contains two main streams - the talks selected by the organizers and covering various general topics and the developer rooms.

The developer rooms are spread across multiple buildings at the venue and are focused around specific concepts, technologies, and ideas. This is where the fun is.

For the next event in 2024, there is a new developer room that I like, and I want to encourage you to submit a talk proposal if you have something interesting to share.

It's about the email. Ugh, what?

Email is something we always connected with the Internet. Per the team, organizing the room, it's even defined as "the workhorse of digital communication".

I remember the first email I received at my Altavista account. It was spam, but we called it a message back then :)

Now, everyone uses at least three email accounts for automation, communication, subscriptions, phishing, and for any good and not-so-good reason.

Under the hood, there is a complex ecosystem comprising technologies, protocols, privacy, AI, UI, UX, and more and more. Let's not forget about the passion!

Speak at FOSDEM

How would you make that ecosystem better?

The "Modern E-mail" organizers want your input on that:

Email is the workhorse of digital communication. It's one of the oldest decentralized messaging platforms, and we must keep implementations up to date with new standards/techniques/programming languages.

The "Modern Email" developer room is new at FOSDEM and seeks speakers, volunteers, and participants! We want to get together as email developers/users, learn about each other's projects, have technical discussions, exchange implementation/operational experiences, and share plans and visions for the future of email.

Some suggestions for talks:

1. Your free/open source software project(s) related to email. From demo to details.
2. Current developments, upcoming standards, e.g. JMAP, structured data.
3. Efforts to modernize our email ecosystem, e.g., through implementations in modern languages.
4. Integrating email with other software, e.g., through APIs.

The submission deadline is 1 December 2023. You can find more info on GitHub here. .