Wouter Verhelst

A technical overview of how the FOSDEM conference is run: the tools we use, the tools we wrote, and the processes we use; both for the in-person version of the conference as well as the online one of which we're doing our second edition this year.

SReview is a conference video review system, originally written for FOSDEM 2017, that is now being used for the third time at FOSDEM 2019. It is also in active use by the debconf video team.

This talk will explain the background in which it was written, and will also give a somewhat detailed explanation of its inner workings.

For an explanation of the detailed UI design work we did to the review page over the last year, see the companion talk in the open source design devroom.

Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the SReview interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why. The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

Early in 2018 I responded to a call for help published in the Open Source Design jobs board (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/). It was from the maintainer of something called SReview (https://github.com/yoe/sreview), which happens to be the software FOSDEM uses to capture, post-process and publish the videos of all the talks at the conference.

SReview takes a rather ingenious approach to the problem of how to review presentation videos before publication. Instead of the small video team doing all the work, which would take ages, they crowdsource the task, by asking the speakers themselves to review their own presentations. Speakers get an early preview of the video - something they appreciate -, and the FOSDEM video team gets the job done faster. Everybody wins.

There was only one small problem: the interface speakers had to use to review presentation videos was not working. Speakers kept making mistakes in the process, which caused a lot of extra work for the FOSDEM video team.

Over the past 10 months we redesigned the interface in a user-centred, collaborative, iterative and open way. This talk explains how we went about it. Using a model of the "ideal" design process as a reference, we'll show where we deviated from it and why.

The moral of the story? There is no best way of doing design. The best way of doing design is the way that suits your project.

Other people: Belen Barros Pena

The DebConf video team has a long history, and used a well-known set of software over many years. This year, however, we changed most of our software stack, and bought new cameras as well. This should keep us ready for the future. Come and see what we've been up to, and learn about how the DebConf video team has changed over the past year.

This talk will describe the NBD protocol: what is it, what can it do, and why is it relevant for virtualization and IaaS. We will also touch at a few features that have been specified for the protocol, but so far have not been implemented in any known implementation.

The Network Block Device (NBD) was originally written for the Linux kernel, to use and export block devices over a network (TCP) link. Its feature set was very limited, however, which limited its practical usability for many purposes. Over the years, however, the protocol has evolved, with features such as better negotiation, improved reliability through flush requests, and awareness of holes in backing files being implemented.

Recent versions of QEMU implement the client side of the protocol, while at the same time also being able to export local resources through NBD. This situation makes it possible for NBD to be used as a protocol for shared storage, backup, or mirroring of resources to other systems for live migration.

We will quickly cover the history of the protocol, describing some of the features that were added over the years; make a short comparison against similar protocols such as iSCSI and AoE and why NBD is relevant in that context; and then move on to newer features that were added to the protocol at the request of the QEMU developers.

In 2001, I uploaded the very first nbd-client and nbd-server packages into Debian. A few years later, I took over upstream maintenance. Much has changed in that time, both in Debian and in the wider open source community. Some of it had an impact on NBD, some of it did not. This talk will reflect on 15 years of NBD history, contrast it against Debian's history over the same time period, and see what we can learn from it.