We are pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the Transparent AI devroom at FOSDEM 2027, taking place on 30 January 2027 in Brussels, Belgium.

AI is becoming part of almost every piece of software, yet most AI systems are still black boxes. We often don't know what a model was trained on, how it behaves once deployed, why it gives a certain answer, or what happens to the data we send it. The Transparent AI devroom brings together free and open source projects that make AI systems open, observable, explainable and verifiable.

Topics

We welcome talks from developers, maintainers, researchers and practitioners on topics such as:

Open models and open data

• Fully open models: open weights, open training data, open training code and documentation

• Open datasets, data provenance and licensing

• Reproducible training, open checkpoints and open evaluation

• Multilingual and regional open models, including for underrepresented languages

• What "open" means for AI in practice, and how open definitions are applied

Observability and monitoring

• Tracing and telemetry for AI applications and agents

• Visualising training and inference in real time

• Monitoring quality, drift, cost and failures in production

• Open evaluation pipelines and benchmarks

Explainability and interpretability

• Tools for attribution and feature importance

• Mechanistic interpretability and open interpretability infrastructure

• Model cards, documentation and auditing tools

• Testing for bias, fairness and safety with open tools

Verifiable and privacy-preserving AI

• Running AI locally or on self-hosted infrastructure

• Verifiable inference and attestation for AI workloads

• Protecting prompts, files and training data

• Implementing transparency requirements in open source projects

We are especially interested in practical talks about real tools and deployments, including lessons from failures; talks that connect communities, such as open model builders working with observability or interpretability projects; and talks from small community-driven projects.

Scope

Talks must focus on free and open source software, open models or open data. Product pitches, demos of proprietary services and talks centred on closed models will not be accepted.

Format

We expect most talks to be 20–25 minutes including questions. We will also offer a few 5–10 minute lightning talk slots for short project introductions and demos.

Code of Conduct

We'd like to remind all speakers and attendees that all of the presentations and discussions in our devroom are held under the guidelines set in the FOSDEM Code of Conduct and we expect attendees, speakers, and volunteers to follow the CoC at all times

Recording and licence

Recordings and slides will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

You can enter proposals until 2026-12-12 23:59 (Europe/Brussels), 1 month, 3 weeks from now.