It’s FOSDEM 2025 this weekend, and it looks awesome. There’s even some cool web archive stuff in the Open Research track!
I’d considered going, but foolishly decided to make it conditional on having a Main Track talk proposal accepted. That was probably a bit too ambitious, given they had higher profile folks they thought they’d rather hear from… ;-)
In the British Bullseye spirit of seeing what you could have won, here is the abstract for my rejected talk proposal. I think it’s got good bones. Maybe I’ll try again next year… But I reckon I should go along to FOSDEM 2026 either way.
How Open Source Will Save the Future of History #
For centuries, our libraries and archives have sifted and sampled the public and private records of our lives, and kept them safe so the future can understand the past. But in recent decades, the shift to a digital world has radically changed the nature of the task. The ‘great wave’ of born-digital history has started to land.
Keeping the bytes safe is crucial, but actual access needs more. Every publication is propped up by the festering nest of software, hardware, data and network dependencies that lie beneath it. From Wordstar to Wordpress, floppy disks to Google Docs, our modern memory institutions are now responsible for preserving and maintaining access to thousands of different digital formats.
The biggest challenges are funding, cybersecurity, and knowledge loss. It is this last part where open source community has played such a pivotal role. Every open implementation of a file format provides us with the concrete, executable knowledge we need to open up that sliver of our memories. Just as important is the documentation around each one, capturing the critical context and the practical knowledge of how to get things done.
This presentation will share some of the success stories from the use of open source software to preserve digital history, but also illustrate the gaps and risks that remain. The Future Nostalgia project will be introduced as a potential way for the open source community to directly contribute to the preservation of digital history. The goal of the project to bring together the very best practical advice on how to manage and migrate data that is locked up on floppy disks. For that, we need your help to connect the right people, to find the right information, to refine our workflows and to build the evidence base that can guide our choice of tools and tactics.
The more links we can forge between the digital preservation and the open source communities, the more of our history we can save for the future.