Biography | Zoë Kooyman — The First Brussels Weekend After Two Online FOSDEMs

People treat FOSDEM as a developers' meeting that executives only watch on a stream.

In February 2023 the executive director of the Free Software Foundation went back to the campus.

FOSDEM 2023 ran on 4 and 5 February at the Université libre de Bruxelles Campus du Solbosch, around Avenue Franklin Roosevelt in Ixelles.

It was the first in-person edition after the 2021 and 2022 meetings had been held entirely online.

Organizers counted on the order of eight thousand people, hundreds of talks, and the usual scatter of rooms across buildings J, K, H and U.

An Open Knowledge Foundation interview published on 27 February 2023 recorded that the conversation with Zoë Kooyman took place in mid-February, a few days after she had taken part in that Brussels weekend.

The pin is the campus, not a hotel or a private address.

Solbosch has been the ordinary home of FOSDEM since the meeting settled in Brussels.

Kooyman's public year as director was then almost twelve months old.

The Foundation had spent that year on internal reorganization and on a new process that let associate members nominate and assess board candidates.

A European developers' meeting is a different room from a Boston press release.

It is where the people who write the software the Foundation defends actually sit for a weekend.

She was there as the person now paid to speak for that defense, not as the event producer she had been in 2019.

The campus is public during the conference.

The visitor in February still finds the same slope of buildings between the tram stop marked ULB and the Janson lecture hall.

Photo: Ruben Rodriguez, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.