CHAOSSMonthly - November and December 2025

[ElizabethN]

CHAOSSMonthly Newsletter - November and December 2025

👇 In this Issue

• Meetings (mostly) on Pause until 2026
• CHAOSScon EU 2026 News:
  • Interactive Session Proposals due Dec 18
  • Schedule and Speakers Released (Including our Keynote)
  • Our New Venue: Commons Hub
• Newcomer Hangout for Asia-Pacific CHAOTICS
• New Slack Channel: #data-engineering
• CHAOTIC of the Month: Damián Vicino

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📆 CHAOSS Meetings are (Mostly) on Pause Until 2026

In the spirit of saving us all from burnout, CHAOSS typically takes a few weeks off from meetings during the holidays and new year to reset and enjoy a break. Most CHAOSS meetings are canceled from December 8, 2025-January 5, 2026.

A few of our Working Groups have decided to meet this week, so for a full list of meetings that are still in place, we encourage you to check out the CHAOSS Calendar.

See you next year! 🥳

📰 CHAOSSCon EU 2026 News:

Submit your CHAOSScon Interactive Sessions by December 18

This year we are extremely fortunate to include CHAOSScon EU as a part of the Open Source Village. And because we are hosting our event at the Commons Hub, we will have space for interactive sessions! Would you like to run a BoF? Or perhaps host a workshop where attendees can gain hands-on experience? We would love to hear your ideas! Please submit them by December 18, 2025 using this form. We can't wait to see what you come up with!

You can read more about the Open Source Village in this lovely blog post by Georg Link.

Schedule and Speakers Announced

We are thrilled to announce that we have released the schedule for CHAOSScon EU 2026! Although we are still finalizing the interactive sessions and lightning talks, you can see the main schedule here.

Our keynote speaker is David Lippert who will be talking about Discovering and measuring the impact and health of Digital Public Goods. We can't wait to hear David's insight on this!

Commons Hub is our New Venue

We changed venues this year and are excited to be partnering with the folks at the amazing [Commons Hub Brussels](Commons Hub Brussels). Commons Hub offers a more central location, a community-focused culture, and several different rooms that allow us to expand our conference and create something different. They have been true partners to CHAOSS and we can't wait!

🌏 New Hangout for Asia Pacific Newcomers

For our friends in the Asia Pacific regions our current Newcomer Hangout is not very accessible with regard to time zones. The CHAOSS Asia chapter has decided to dedicate the first part of every Community Meeting to newcomers! Although we are taking a break during the holidays and end of year, this group's last meeting of the year is on Thursday, December 11. Check the CHAOSS Calendar for specifics.

💻 New Slack Channel #data-engineering

If you're interested in discussing more technical details of database platforms, metrics tooling, and other related topics, we have a new Slack channel just for you! #data-engineering is now the place where you can engage in those conversations. There is currently no formal working group for this topic, but there is plenty of async discussion.

❤️ CHAOTIC of the Month - Damián Vicino

A little about Damián:
I’ve been participating in Open Source for over 20 years, originally triggered by curiosity about how filesystems and peer-to-peer networks really worked by poking around the FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and aMule codebases. Currently, I work in Datadog’s Open Source Program Office and teach C++ at Carleton University.

What Damián works on at CHAOSS:
Nowadays, most software is built by composing hundreds of smaller projects, generally distributed as packages by many different package managers. In CHAOSS, I’m chair of the package-metadata working group, where we investigate the internals of the most popular package managers to understand where each is more successful than others. From what we learn in this research, we produce recommendations for future package managers to have an easier start, and we try to contribute these learnings to existing package managers where we identify improvement opportunities.

Damián's advice to newcomers:
Thanks to Open Source, it is possible to explore any idea you may have without needing to build a multinational company. Do you want to easily see commas when printing a CSV in the console? Go poke around the cat.c code and make them red—no need to build a new OS from scratch or even write a completely new cat command. This was not the case 30 years ago. Take advantage of it, learn as much as you can, and when you have an opportunity, share what you build so others can learn and build too.

To connect with Damián and learn more about his work, visit:
https://github.com/sdavtaker
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvicino

👯 Community Reminders

Add your Community Contributions via an Issue on GitHub

We now have an easier way to add your community contribution to our community-contributions.md document. Simply open an issue using the CHAOSS Contribution Issue Template, and when you submit your issue, your contribution will be added.

Looking for Podcast Questions and Ideas for CHAOSScast

Alice Sowerby, Harmony Elendu, and the CHAOSScast team would love to hear your questions, comments, and ideas for new episodes of CHAOSScast! Feel free to send an email to podcast@chaoss.community with your thoughts.

CHAOTIC of the Month Nomination Form

Have you noticed a fellow CHAOTIC doing something amazing for CHAOSS? Has there been someone who is going above and beyond? If you'd like to nominate them for CHAOTIC of the Month, now you can! With our CHAOTIC of the Month feature, we like to celebrate their contributions to CHAOSS and enable our whole community to get to know them a little better. It's a great way to show appreciation for our fellow CHAOTICs so don't hesitate to nominate someone through our CHAOTIC of the Month Nomination Form.

Upcoming Meetings

Please refer to the CHAOSS Community Calendar for details on all upcoming meetings. Meetings should show in your local timezone, but you can convert to another time zone here. You can also subscribe to individual meetings on the CHAOSS Community Calendar by right-clicking the .ics file and adding to your calendar as a URL.