FOSDEM 2025

Last weekend I attended this years edition of FOSDEM in Brussels again. Besides meeting old and new friends I focussed on emergency and weather alerting as well as public transport topics.

KDE

KDE had a stand again, this time in the minimally less crowded (on the FOSDEM scale of crowdedness at least) AW building, next to our friends from GNOME.

Besides getting stickers, t-shirts and even the rare handmade amigurumi Konqi mascots you could see KDE software running on a large range of devices, from laptops and phones to embedded boards, drawing tables and handheld gaming consoles.

Emergency & Weather Alerts

Together with Nucleus I had a talk on Saturday about the public alert server we have been working on.

This resulted in numerous interesting conversations:

• There are people looking into getting access to alerts in other countries.
• Learned about the CAP over XMPP standard (XEP 0127), which could be a more efficient way to receive CAP messages compared to the current high frequency CAP feed polling. We yet have to find a alerting authority supporting that though.
• The Netherlands open-sourced their national weather app a few days prior to FOSDEM.
• Possible approaches for integrating alerts with home automation systems, something particularly interesting in an accessibility context.
• Adapting to UnifiedPush’s work on aligning with the WebPush standard.

There was also an interesting and somewhat related discussion on how to test cell broadcast, emergency calls and emergency location services on free mobile platforms. Especially testing emergency location services is tricky and not even the Google-free Android platforms have that at the moment as it’s part of Google Play Services rather than AOSP (ie. the closed source rather than the open source part of Android).

On the way to FOSDEM I managed to port the KDE public alert client to the new server API. It still needs a UI refresh though, as it’s based on a 5 era prototype.

Transitous

On Sunday Felix, Jonah and Marcus presented Transitous in the Railways and Open Transport track.

As this was unfortunately the second to last talk of the event there wasn’t much time for discussions afterwards, but at least for several people involved with Transitous FOSDEM has been the first opportunity to meet in person. It’s great to see how this has grown in just one year.

For more of that, there was also a discussion about organizing a Transitous sprint/hack weekend.

Travel

Spending several hours on various trains to get there and back also provides plenty of opportunity for field-testing KDE Itinerary, which allowed the new and much more comprehensive and efficient realtime update approach using trip queries to be tested and integrated for 25.04.