FOSDEM 2019 report

At the beginning of the month seven Team Kodi members attended FOSDEM, Europe's largest meeting of Free and Open Source Software developers that takes place over two days each year in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM is a great opportunity to meet up amongst ourselves, and with friends from projects like VideoLAN and FFmpeg.

Day 1 started early with Martijn's presentation on Kodi v18 in the Open Media devroom. The room was fully packed, so if you couldn't attend or catch the livestream you can watch a recording of the session here. After that, we hung out in front of the room to continue talking with interested attendees and answering questions.

In a first for the team, we also held a Kodi meet-up in the BoF room. We did not know what to expect or if anyone would show up to chat, but despite some minor room confusion (not the one we advertised on our blog, but FOSDEM got it right) our concerns disappeared when 15-20 people arrived. There was no specific agenda, but several users engaged us on topics like Linux/NVIDIA support or the new RetroPlayer experience. We were also asked how to participate in the project without being a C++ or Python coder, and this led to some of the team members active in the project for a long time sharing some of the backstories behind our efforts. As a small reward for choosing to attend our meet-up instead of one of the numerous alternatives, we handed out free Kodi stickers. Unfortunately, there is no recording of this session, but if you were present and have feedback or want us to do this again next year? Please contact us.

Day 2 had no Kodi-specific events so we could mingle with the crowds, visit the booths of other projects, and watch talks we were interested in. It sounds like a lazy day, but was actually hard work due to the impressive number of people attending this year! We would like to publicly thank the organisers for another awesome FOSDEM weekend, and we look forward to attending again next year!

Lastly we owe thanks to our sponsors and donors whose support enables us to attend events like FOSDEM to represent the project and engage our users. If you want to support Kodi and have some spare change, please consider making a donation.