XWiki at FOSDEM 2023

23 Feb 2023 5 min read

Written by

The XWiki Team

As per tradition, our year has started with our participation at FOSDEM 2023, the biggest free Open Source event in Europe, where thousands of developers from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. This year's edition got even better with physical attendance becoming once again an official option. You can hardly imagine the excitement of everyone when we found out that we'll be able to be there after 2 years of online sessions.

Our team organized the traditional "Collaborative Information and Content Management Applications" devroom and also participated with presentations in 2 other tracks, tackling different hot subjects such as how to consolidate the privacy of software through open-source, the importance of the core Collaborative Software used by individuals and companies, and the progress and challenges of the Open Source communities.

Simon Urli, R&D Engineer

I haven't participated in the online version of FOSDEM in the last 2 years, but it was definitely great to be back in person to the FOSDEM for me. It felt like there were a bit fewer people than in 2020, but still, I was happy to be able to go to some rooms and listen to entirely new topics that I wouldn't have heard about otherwise. This year I think I mostly enjoyed finishing the day at the stand on Saturday: we kept having people coming to ask questions about XWiki and CryptPad and it was easier to take time to talk as there were fewer people.

Anca Luca, Client services CTO

Feels like the world is finally starting to turn the right way again. Fosdem really has a special energy, of Europe coming together to achieve things. There was a bit of that online as well, but there's nothing like the hallways of ULB full of passionate people, meeting people that I only meet once a year (at Fosdem) and seeing the existing and future users of our software for real. As every year, the culture of knowledge management of the people coming by the XWiki stand is getting better and better, but this year it was like a big shift, like we're presenting a different product, and yet it's the same :). It must be the 3 years that have gone by... Walking around with the team at night in beautiful Bruxelles is always a great moment; this year even more so as Boulevard Anspach is now pedestrian (when we left it in 2020 it was closed for roadwork).

Theo von Arx, R&D Engineer in CryptPad Squad

Something I will not forget soon is my presentation about CryptPad in front of around 150 people in the security dev room. I was quite nervous, but the presentation went well in the end. It was nice too see CryptPad users and hear how value our project

Manuel Leduc, R&D Engineer

This was the first in-person FOSDEM for me. The remote event was nice but I did not participate that much during those years. Participants were really interested in the presentations, and the quality of the talks and discussions was great with a lot of diversity.

Raphaël Jakse, R&D Engineer

This was my first time at FOSDEM on-site. I'm kinda impressed an entire campus is barely enough to host an "informal" event related to free software. I guess it's good news. Doing it online was somewhat boring. In no particular order: thank you to contributors of projects I have been using/relying on for years. Seeing people enthusiastic about XWiki and CryptPad adds meaning to the job, seeing Tantacrul. Having enthousiastic conversations with people, including those from Nextcloud. Spending time with colleagues.

Clément Aubin, Account Manager

It was great to be able to see each other again "in real life" instead of by chats. On the devroom side, the Collaborative Information and Content Management Applications devroom that we organized got a lot of success during the on-site event, with very interesting talks coming from projects all over the world. We even managed to fly a Japanese speaker for one talk. We had the great opportunity to discuss with some of the Open Source companies (OpenProject, NextCloud, Element, Collabora, NordDeck) that we are working with as part of a large project funded by the German State. Below you can enjoy the video from our Collab devroom:

Saturday

Collaborating with Collabora Online

Migrating from proprietary to Open-Source knowledge management tools

Deploy an enterprise search server with Fess

Optimizing your core application for integration

Nextcloud Numbers and Hubs

The Relentless March of Markdown

Privacy and Collaboration: How CryptPad lets you have both

Transparent, asynchronous, efficient communication

Sunday

Conquering tribal knowledge with Grav

Creating a content pipeline with Antora

Tribe - a content structuring and collaborative framework

Open Source Collaboration Tools for Alfresco

Tackling document collaboration challenges in 2023

How was your FOSDEM?

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