Richard Fontana

Tom Marble is collecting <a href="http://info9.net/wiki/fosdem/LegalIssuesDevRoom/Speakers/">pointers</a> to slides and related blog posts.

This comment puzzles me. Which talks were characterized by "politically-correct" "FSF dogmatism"? Even FSF director John Sullivan's talk doesn't seem thus describable. My talk included specific criticism of the FSF, as did Michael Meeks's talk. The speakers were a mix of Americans and Europeans.

Regarding "beyond challenge", it is true that longer sessions would have allowed for more questions from the audience. The schedule we designed reflected the desire to have as many presentations in the limited amount of time we were allotted (while allowing breaks).

The implication of UScentrism seems mostly unfair. It is true that the co-organizers were all Americans, and this cannot be considered completely coincidental. However, early on we tried to get a number of European lawyers as co-organizers. None of those we contacted were interested or available. (FOSDEM, I should note, is the sort of conference I think both European and US lawyers would have a professional tendency to overlook.) We also solicited talk proposals from the <a href="http://fsfe.org/projects/ftf/network.en.html">European Legal Network</a> mailing list, an invitation-only list dominated by European lawyers interested in FLOSS, but received only limited interest. (Full disclosure: I am a subscriber to this list, though IANAEL [nor do I play one on TV].) It is worth noting that the European Legal Network operates its own invitation-only <a href="http://fsfe.org/projects/ftf/legal-conference.en.html">conference</a> which I suppose might have the indirect effect of reducing the natural interest of its members in participating in FOSDEM.

If you have ideas for how the devroom CFP might be better publicized for next year, particularly among Europeans, we'd be very interested in hearing them.