FOSDEM 2026

Saturday, 7 February 2026 | Volker Krause

Last weekend I attended this years edition of FOSDEM in Brussels again, mostly focusing on KDE and Open Transport topics.

KDE

As usual, KDE had a stand, this time back in the K building and right next to our friends from GNOME. Besides various stickers, t-shirts and hoodies, a few of the rare amigurumi Konqis where also available. And of course demos of our software on laptops, mobile phones, gaming consoles and graphic tables.

KDE stand at FOSDEM showing several members of the KDE crew and the KDE table with phones, laptops and a drawing tablet as well as stickers and t-shirts. — KDE stand (photo by Bhushan Shah)

Several KDE contributors also appeared in the conference program, such as Aleix’s retrospective on 30 years of KDE and Albert’s talk on Okular.

Itinerary

Meeting many people who have just traveled to FOSDEM is also a great opportunity to gather feedback on Itineray, especially with many disruptions allowing to test various special cases.

Eurostar’s ticket scanners apparently can’t deal with binary ticket barcodes correctly, however that’s exactly what the standard UIC SSB barcode they use on their Thalys routes is. Their off-spec workaround to base64-encode the content is now preserved by Itinerary.
With DB’s API being blocked increasingly often from other countries we now regularly end up with data mixed from different sources. That exposed some issues with merging data with a different amount of intermediate stops, e.g. due to ÖBB’s API listing border points there as well.

Open Transport Community

For the fourth time FOSDEM had a dedicated Railways and Open Transport track. It’s great to see this to continue to evolve with now also policymakers and regulators not just attending but being actively involved. And not just at FOSDEM, I’m very happy to see community members being consulted and involved in legislation and standardization processes at the moment that were largely inaccessible to us until not too long ago.

Just in time for FOSDEM we also got a commitment for a venue for the next iteration of the Open Transport Community Conference, in October in Bern, Switzerland, at the SBB headquarter. More on that in a future post.

Transitous

At FOSDEM 2024 Transitous got started. What we have there today goes far beyond what seemed achievable back then, just two years ago. And it’s being put to use, the Transitous website lists a dozen applications built on top of it, and quite a few of the talks in the Railways and Open Transport track at FOSDEM referenced it.

Jonah showed his work on crowd-sourcing delay information, for filling gaps in officially provided data.
Adam presented how Bimba got global transport coverage thanks to Transitous.
David talked about the state of open(ing) Czech public transport data, data that Transitous relies on.
Lluis showed the work behind Citybikes to collect historic data from bike sharing systems, something potentially very interesting for availability predictions in intermodal routing.

And more

The above doesn’t capture all of FOSDEM of course, as every couple of meters you run into somebody else to talk to, so I also got to discuss new developments on standardization around semantic annotations in emails, OSM indoor mapping or new map vector tile formats, among other things.