“These are the only cookies you should ever accept” said the mozilla employee, handing me a chocolate chip cookie. I had waited in line in the mild February Belgian drizzle for about 10 minutes for this prize– because who couldn’t say no to a cheeky freebie like that?
I was in Brussels to talk about DiSSCo at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting. FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of open source enthusiasts in the world. DiSSCo is fully open source, meaning the source code is available for anyone to view and make suggestions. We’re working on developing a community of contributors with our Machine Annotation Services, and I was hoping FOSDEM would be a good avenue to showcase what we’ve done so far.
FOSDEM isn’t your typical conference, however. Throughout the campus, you’ll find people wearing floppy traffic pylon hats (a nod to VLC media player), flashy LED name tags, and of course, t-shirts from across the event’s 26 year history. Over 8,000 people convene at ULB University in Brussels for the two-day event, and the crowds are beyond a scale you’d find just about anywhere else. The atmosphere is electric.
Opening talk, FOSDEM 2026
With 71 tracks and 1216 speakers this year, there is a wide range of talks to pique the interest of any kind of open source enthusiast. There are highly technical tracks, governance and policy related tracks, and tracks run by nerdy hobbyists.
And of course, there’s the Open Research dev room. This multidisciplinary community connects free and open source technology and the researchers who use them – or develop them. There, you can find the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. Can you make a microscope open source? What skills are important for FLOSS development in research? How do we make AI workflows reproducible?
What if there was a European wide infrastructure for digitized natural history collections?
The people in the Open Research dev room were kind enough to allow me to answer that last question during their track.
I take the podium at the Open Research Dev room
9:30 am on Sunday morning, I arrived with my sleepy colleagues to the dev room, expecting it to be completely empty that early in the day. I was pleasantly surprised to find an attentive group, including biologists, taxonomists, and science geeks. I was thrilled to talk about our work in DiSSCo to such a warm and curious crowd. People were excited about DiSSCo – and they wanted to get involved.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak about DiSSCo through several avenues, from doing communications within my own museum, to giving presentations for DiSSCo stakeholders, giving technical demos, and even appearing on camera once or twice. But I’ve never been so proud to present DiSSCo as I was presenting at FOSDEM. It’s one thing to present the project to people who have already bought in to what you’re doing – it’s another to introduce DiSSCo to a group of people who have never heard of it, and see them quickly get excited about it. That’s the power of what we’re doing with DiSSCo.
You can see the full talk here:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7WCLWM-dissco-community-curation/
DiSSCoTech 