[iot-wg] FOSDEM 2027 Call for Interest: Smart Homes Devroom – Speaker Op

[Ignacio Ahedo <ignacio.ahedo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear IoT Community,

I would like to introduce an exciting opportunity for our community to present and collaborate at FOSDEM 2027.

Maarten Raeymaekers, along with the organising team (Arjen Moermans, Joost Lekkerkerker, and Olivier Daury), has submitted a devroom proposal titled "Smart Homes: Connecting ecosystems, Returning control."

Please note: This devroom proposal has been submitted to FOSDEM 2027 and is currently awaiting official approval. In the meantime, we are gauging community interest and gathering potential talk proposals so we can be well-prepared to build a strong programme if the track gets the green light.

The goal of the Smart Homes Devroom is to bring together the entire open source smart-home and IoT stack, not as isolated platforms, but as a connected, interoperable technical ecosystem. The devroom aims to demonstrate how open source, local-first, and vendor-independent technologies work together to give users meaningful control over their connected environments.

We are seeking maintainers, core contributors, and experienced practitioners across the IoT and smart home domain. Key topics of interest include:

• Platforms & Automation: Home automation platforms, architectures, orchestration, and workflow integrations.
• Devices & Embedded Systems: Open hardware, embedded software, sensors, actuators, and firmware.
• Interoperability & Messaging: MQTT, Zenoh, Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Z-Wave, event-driven infrastructure, protocol bridges, and gateways.
• Infrastructure & Self-Hosting: Message brokers, storage, homelabs, networking, monitoring, observability, and data visualization.
• Sensing & Edge Intelligence: Local voice assistants, edge AI, computer vision, and occupancy detection.
• Energy Management: Solar integration, battery management, smart EV charging, and energy-aware automation.
• Privacy, Security & Resilience: Local-first operation, security, reliability, and cloud independence.
• Real-World Implementations: Cross-layer integrations, architectural trade-offs, and operational lessons learned.

Talk Formats

• Standard Talk (30 minutes): 25-minute presentation · 3 min Q&A · 2 min changeover (for technical deep dives, architectures, and integrations).
• Short Talk (15 minutes): 10-minute presentation · 3 min Q&A · 2 min changeover (for focused technical topics, compact demos, or concise lessons learned).

Important Dates

• ~27 October 2026: Call for Papers opens
• 24 November 2026 (23:59 CET): Submission deadline
• 5 December 2026: Speaker notifications
• 30–31 January 2027: FOSDEM 2027 (Brussels)

In anticipation of the devroom selection, we want to gauge interest across our community for potential talks, topic proposals, or joint collaborations.

If you are interested in presenting a talk or exploring how your project fits into this track, please reply to this email with your ideas or proposed topics.

Best regards,

Ignacio Ahedo

Program Manager, Oniro, IoT, and Sparkplug | Eclipse Foundation

+34 610 515 468 | X | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | Bluesky | Mastodon

Eclipse Foundation: Global community, European foundation