FOSDEM 2021 Dependency Management Devroom Call For Presentations

Introduction to the Call for Presentations - Deadline December 20th (postponed to Dec. 23)

As open source continues its incredible growth, reusing open source software components has become essential in any software development cycle. The counterpart to this great success is that managing the security, regression and licensing risks generated by reusing existing components has become a critical issue for developers. Most development teams still fail to adequately inventory their software dependencies. Even as more code is produced, indirect dependencies continue to undermine security and account for the majority of vulnerabilities.

As demonstrated by much talked about events such as the LeftPad incident, which led to hundreds of thousands of websites to stop working, and the Equifax data breach, which led to a leak of hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers, dependencies on networks of external libraries can introduce significant operational and compliance risks as well as difficulties to assess security implications.

What have been the recent progresses in dependency management made available to developers? What are the remaining key challenges? What future improvements can we expect from industry or from research?

This Devroom aims to establish the state of the art in dependency management, it builds upon the success of last year’s Devroom to which it will constitute a welcome update.

We are seeking speakers addressing the following topics, plus any related topics you think might fit into the room:

• tools that help solve the dependencies issues,
• use cases and examples of troubles encountered and impact of dependencies issues.

Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

Practical

General details

• The default duration for talks is about 45 minutes including discussion.
• Presentations has to be pre-recorded and streamed before the event.

For accepted talks

• Once your talk was accepted, we will assign you a deputy to help you to produce the pre-recorded content.
• The deputy will review the content and ensure it has the required quality. He is also responsable to ensure the content is into the system and ready to broadcast.
• During the stream of your talk, you must be available online for the Q/A session.

How to submit

Please submit your proposals at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21 . Deadline: December 20th 2020.

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose "Dependency Management" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. 

What information are required: 

• General: First and last name / Nickname (optionnal)/ Image
• Contact:
  • email address
  • mobile number (this is a very hard requirement as there will be no other reliable form of emergency communication on the day)

Create an event:

• On the General page: Event title (required)/ Event subtitle (optionnal).
• Track: Select "Dependency Management Devroom"
• Event type: Lecture (talk)
• Persons: Add yourself as speaker with your bio.
• Description: Abstract (required)/ Full Description (optionnal)
• Links: Add relevant links.

If you have any issue with Pentabarf, please contact dependency-devroom-manager at fosdem.org. You can also send a notification of your submission there.

Important dates

• December 20th 2020: Deadline for submission of proposals - Postponed to December 23. 
• December 25th 2020: Final notification to authors
• December 31th 2020: Developer rooms publish complete schedules
• First two weeks of January: Period for recording and uploading talks by speakers 

Contact

If you have any question related to this Call for Presentations, please send an email to:
Catherine Nuel (catherine.nuel@ow2.org)
Antoine Mottier (antoine.mottier@ow2.org)