I was delighted to be invited to speak at FOSDEM. And I was not at all intimidated to be speaking on the cavernous Janson stage. The audience were lovely0, asked interesting questions1, and - most importantly - laughed in all the right places 😅.
Regular readers will recognise this as being an updated2 version of the talk I gave at EMF 2024 - feel free to watch that one if you want to see if I've improved.
Huge thanks to the AV team and the video-wizards behind the FOSDEM infrastructure.
As I say in my introduction, these are my personal recollections. I no longer work for the Government, so feel free to send any complaints to the circular file.
Feedback
A few pieces of public feedback I got after the talk.
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This #FOSDEM I've learned that @Edent, who up to now I have known for @openbenches, championed making the NHS covid app open source 🤯🚀.
Watch his excellent talk https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4411-lessons-learned-open-sourcing-the-uk-s-covid-tracing-app/
FOSDEM 2025 - Lessons learned Open Sourcing the UK's Covid Tracing App
That's a wrap of #FOSDEM for me, saw lots of great talks. If you have time to watch only two, consider https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4411-lessons-learned-open-sourcing-the-uk-s-covid-tracing-app/ by @Edent and https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4233-privacy-first-architecture-alternatives-to-gdpr-popup-and-local-first/ by @sitnik_en. I found them inspiring for being a good human and I learned something new in both 🤩.
FOSDEM 2025 - Lessons learned Open Sourcing the UK's Covid Tracing App
8 thoughts on “Talking Contact Tracing at FOSDEM”
@Edent Really enjoyed the talk!
| Reply to original comment on mstdn.social
@Edent Unfortunately I couldn't come to Jason during your talk so thanks for your reminder to catch up, which I've done just now.
Excellent talk (as usual) and sorry I couldn't ask a question as an excuse to offer you a beer 😉
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.opencloud.lu
@Edent I liked the talk and thank you for the quick feedback about working on stuff that matters afterwards! 🙂
| Reply to original comment on mas.to
Paul Kelly
Should I be seeing your slides in this video? All I see is what I presume is the initial slide, plus an audio track. I had to download the video, as the streaming kept stalling. The file is 1.12GB which makes me think there is more in there than just audio and one fixed image.
@edent
Yes, there's a video with slides. You can try watching the lower-resolution version on https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4411-lessons-learned-open-sourcing-the-uk-s-covid-tracing-app/
Paul Kelly
Thanks, it's working fine now. I found it very interesting, as my perception from the outside was quite different. Is it possible to tell if anyone used the code you made available?
@edent
The nature of the MIT licence is that users of the code are under no obligation to tell the original author(s) that the code is in use.
Anecdotally, we heard of some people re-using bits and pieces. I'm sure a detailed code analysis would reveal exactly who used what when.
Erik
Great talk! Finally got around to watching it. I didn't know much about open source, so it was interesting to hear about it in the context of the contact tracing app!
It makes me curious about how this process went here in the Netherlands.
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