Being so privacy focused in this day and age...<p>FOSDEM was (and is!) accessible without a reservation, without handing them your personal details. They were an example before I was ready to understand the importance.<p>I hope they will be able to "get back to normal" next year.
The huge overcrowding and damp winter weather at FOSDEM always seemed to make it a disease vector. All of my team returned home ill after each FOSDEM. Makes sense not to try to run it in person.
Great! All conferences should transition to having an online edition (in addition to an in-person event if there is demand). Not everybody can travel half way around the world to a conference. It's also often much more inclusive- personally I am much more comfortable pre-recording a talk or livestreaming a talk online than presenting in person.
I think the best part of these conferences is not actually the talks, but rather the chance in-person encounters with other developers you wouldn't get to meet otherwise.
I see some comments to the effect of "so much for going back to normal". But only those who have actually been to FOSDEM will grok why they chose to go online for 2022. It's jam-packed in the best of times, and many contract the (in)famous "FOSDEM cold".<p>It sucks, but I understand and fully support the FOSDEM staff's decision to go virtual for 2022. I'm saying this as someone who has been going to FOSDEM since 2012; and as a co-organizer of one of the Dev Rooms.
I don't know when they decided it exactly but FOSDEM usually takes place in Brussels, at the ULB / VUB (<i>Université Libre de Bruxelles / Vrije Universiteit Brussel</i>) and these last days the numbers of new COVID cases are really through the roof in Belgium and Brussels more specifically (Brussels being the belgian city with the lowest vaccination rate in the country) and several politicians are asking once again, as you can guess it, for more and more restrictions.