𝕭𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖕𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖑 🎬

Participatory platforms are now widely used across Europe for consultations, participatory budgeting, petitions, and deliberation. However, despite this growth, civic tech ecosystems remain deeply fragmented: platforms are isolated, data is locked into silos, and citizen contributions rarely travel across institutional levels or over time. This fragmentation limits transparency, weakens democratic legitimacy, and prevents collective learning at scale.

This talk presents the Democracy Data Space, an open, interoperable infrastructure designed to reconnect participatory processes across platforms, institutions, and territories while preserving local autonomy and data sovereignty. Inspired by European data space principles and built on open standards, this initiative explores how interoperability can enable traceability of citizen contributions, federated identity, shared governance rules, and cross-platform democratic intelligence.

We will share:

The political and technical problems caused by today's civic tech silos The core architectural principles of a Democracy Data Space How open protocols and federated data spaces enable democratic traceability Early experiments, governance challenges, and next steps for this european data space for democracy This session is aimed at open-source developers, civic tech builders, data space practitioners, and anyone interested in building public digital infrastructure for democracy.

speakers: 'Sylvain Le Bon'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/LXBQWL-data-space-for-democracy/'

The 2024 European elections marked the start of the new 5 year mandate of the European Parliament followed by forming a new political direction of the European Commission. What does this change mean for cryptography and its regulation in Europe? How can encryption be framed as a vital tool to secure fundamental rights in the digital age, rather than as a law enforcement nightmare? The talk will primarily focus on the recent developments in political narratives around securing access to encrypted data by law enforcement authorities, the current European Commission's plans as presented in ProtectEU: the European Internal Security Strategy, and the impact on privacy, security, and Free and Open Source Software.

speakers: 'Marcel Kolaja'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/C8ZS7H-how_is_the_european_commission_planning_to_break_cryptography_this_time/'

Europe's IT landscape has long been heavily reliant on just a few large American tech providers, and this is equally true for the systems used in public administration. This dependence jeopardises the administrative services that underpin our states' functioning. To counter this, Europe needs a tech stack that strengthens digital sovereignty at every level, from databases and virtualisation to operating systems and end-user applications.

Various governments and governmental organisations in Europe are already working to provide building blocks for a sovereign public infrastructure. The newly founded European Digital Infrastructure Consortium for Digital Commons (DC-EDIC) can fuel this development. This session brings together actors involved in setting up DC-EDIC in conversation with civil society and the wider open source community. We will explore the EDIC's role in supporting the open source ecosystem, as well its connections to European policy:

With this session, we hope to help steer the EU's ambitions for digital sovereignty toward models that genuinely empower the open source community and reinforce the sustainability of Digital Commons.

speakers: 'Lea Beiermann

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EZB7MP-power_to_the_public_stack_governing_europes_digital_commons/'

Our digital lives are increasingly fragmented across numerous centralised online services. This model concentrates power, leaving us with minimal technical control over our personal data and online identities. The long-term permanence of these platforms is uncertain, and their commercial incentives are often misaligned with user interests. We propose inverting this model: instead of centralising our data in proprietary silos, let's centralise our presence under our own control using open, federated services. We introduce the concept of ‘digital islands', or Eileans – self-hosted hubs for an individual's or community's online presence. By hosting services ourselves, we regain autonomy and control. Eilean is a project designed to simplify the creation and management of these digital islands. The core idea is to parameterise a complete operating system deployment by a domain name and a desired set of services. This allows users to easily deploy their own instances of federated services like Matrix, Mastodon, and E-Mail. We utilise NixOS to enable declarative, reproducible configuration and deployment of these services. This provides strong guarantees about the system's state.

https://github.com/RyanGibb/eilean-nix

Get in touch at https://ryan.freumh.org/about.html

See the slides at https://ryan.freumh.org/var/fosdem/eilean.html

speakers: 'Ryan Gibb'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/UERPXG-eilean/'

Roundtable discussion with policymakers and the community: how can the public procurement framework, that is currently being reformed, be used to achieve digital sovereignty goals? Open Source provides many answers to the questions digital sovereignty raises, but how can public procurers be empowered to buy more Open Source, what are their expectations, and what hurdles exist?

speakers: 'Sebastian Raible

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/WKCBGM-procurement-sovereignty/'

I'll present my story of building a machine-readable inventory of computing equipment of my employer. It collects information such as: “This computer is located in this room with this network configuration, these software requirements and is connected to this port of this switch” so that I can easily develop scripts that configure the machine, the switch, monitoring of both and many other things including a physical map.

I went through many iterations of this project–codenamed AR–and settled on NixOS modules for their balance between how easy it is to write new records and how easy it is to use them. Let me share the joy it brought to my job and present curated code snippets so you can build your own inventory with ease.

speakers: 'Vojtěch Káně'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/KHD9WF-building_a_digital_inventory_with_nixos_modules/'

With TAPPaaS we are building a small, composable private cloud for homes, communities and small organisations. It should feel like an enterprise‑grade packaged solution, but be built fully with FOSS and declarative Nix/NixOS tooling. Our current design is a 2‑node cluster with a third backup node, using Proxmox as cluster manager, NixOS and flakes for all VMs running platform services. All changes go through GitOps workflows, and services are packaged as NixOS modules that share central identity, secrets, backup and monitoring. We will show the architecture, NixOS/Flake deployment structure and CI/CD pipeline, and how declarative configuration helps with upgrades, failures and restores. This talk is for Nix/NixOS users and operators who want to turn homelab ideas into robust platforms for real organisations. We will share what works and where we struggle, and invite experienced nixers to challenge our choices and point us to patterns and tools we should adopt.

speakers: 'Lars'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EAPNQF-tappaas_a_resilient_trusted_automated_private_cloud_based_on_nixos/'

Last year we open sourced a Containerization framework and container CLI tooling to enable developers to create and run Linux container images directly on their Mac in a way that focuses on security and privacy. In this talk, we'll dive into the Containerization framework, describing its foundational role in creating the container CLI which enables users to build, run and deploy Linux containers on Mac. We'll walk through the architecture, highlight key APIs and discuss why we wrote it in Swift. We'll then discuss some of our future roadmap for feature development and integration opportunities and challenges in the existing open source ecosystem.

speakers: 'Eric Ernst'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SEFQ3Q-containerization_the_future/'