As submitted to Pretalx ~okt 4, 2026
We invite proposals from developers, researchers, and any enthusiasts working with open source tools in the life sciences. Whether you're from academia, industry, or the public sector, we want to hear about:
We especially encourage submissions that:
We have several talk Formats:
Note: All talks will be live-streamed and recorded (audio+video). By submitting, you agree to being recorded and that your content will be published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.
Biology is being transformed by high-throughput technologies that generate vast amounts of data, and new AI and machine learning approaches for analysis and interpretation. In a field increasingly dominated by closed source and proprietary systems, Free and Open implementations of efficient algorithms, on-prem and sovereign parallel computing infrastructures (GPUs, HPC, cloud platforms), and sophisticated software tools are critical. Open practices are also essential, both for academic rigour, ethical and responsible use, and equity, to ensure computational biology tools and technologies remain accessible to all.
Bioinformatics sits at the intersection of many communities already present at FOSDEM, and our devroom brings both existing FOSDEMers as well as students, researchers and open-source developers working in Life Sciences. Our community has grown from a BoF in 2025, to a half-day devroom in 2026, that received 33 proposals. Most were of high quality and in line with the FOSDEM philosophy, which made selection difficult. We chose a tight schedule to include as many talks as possible, but many did not get the time they deserved, and we had to turn away strong submissions.
The talks showed the diversity of bioinformatics. Some shared experience with production-level code, such as pipelines for protein visualisation, while others applied computing concepts to biology, such as Git for genomes. New tools were presented, like Python packages for metabolomics, movement tracking, and data visualization. Reproducibility and scaling challenges were also well represented. Community was a recurring theme, featured in talks on Debian and open research infrastructure.
This selection showed the creativity of the field and how it meshes with computing, in a way not found elsewhere. We believe we struck the right balance with talks that offered a glimpse of their scientific depth while remaining accessible to open-source hackers. The packed devroom showed that the formula clearly worked. Both audience and speakers were refreshingly diverse, from academia to industry, across many backgrounds, and even in their taste in beer.
Our exchanges with the community during FOSDEM and on our Matrix channel showed a strong need to continue these interactions in a longer format. A full-day devroom at FOSDEM 2027 will let us accept more high-quality proposals and organize the day into thematic blocks (e.g. workflows and reproducibility, machine learning and genAI, tools and libraries, infrastructure and packaging, community), which was not feasible in half a day. We will also add other formats, such as a round-table discussion, speed dating with speakers, demos, etc.
Full day.
Our team has grown since last year and now includes:
Coordinators : Alessandro Pilotti - Open Source Cloud Computing and Bioinformatics Alexis Praga - Medical Doctor, Ph.D in HPC Elena Grassi - Computational Biologist, Bioconductor/Bioconda contributor Freek van Hemert - Next-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis and Infrastructure Jim Procter - Computational Scientist, FOSS Community Marie Hannaert - Bioinformatician Olga Kalinina - Professor in Bioinformatics