The Smart Homes Devroom will give FOSDEM a place where the full open-source smart-home stack comes together: not as competing islands, but as one connected technical ecosystem.

Attendees should leave with a clearer understanding of how these technologies complement each other - and how open source can return meaningful control of the connected home to the people who live in it.

Building an open smart home involves much more than choosing a home automation platform. It requires devices and embedded software, communication protocols, message brokers, orchestration tools, data storage, observability, energy management, edge intelligence and reliable infrastructure. These components are often presented separately, even though their real value emerges when they work together.

The Smart Homes Devroom will connect these layers and demonstrate how open, interoperable, local-first and vendor-independent digital homes can be built in practice.

If your work helps explain how one part of the stack fits into the wider ecosystem, how different technologies integrate, or how open source can deliver more control and long-term value to users, we would like to hear from you.

Scope: All submissions must have a clear and substantial connection to smart homes or home automation. General-purpose talks about infrastructure, AI, security, energy, embedded systems or self-hosting are in scope only when they are directly applied to the smart-home domain.


What We’re Looking For
We are especially interested in talks that close a gap in today's smart-home ecosystem, for example:

- Breaking a silo: a bridge, integration or standard that makes multiple ecosystems/projects work together where they previously did not.
- Taking back control: liberating a cloud-dependent device, replacing a vendor service, or making a home keep working offline.
- Operational reality: what broke after six months, and the architecture or trade-off that fixed it.

Beyond that, we welcome submissions covering topics including, but not limited to:
- Platforms & automation: home automation platforms, architectures, orchestration, workflow tools and integrations.
- Devices & embedded systems: open hardware, embedded systems, sensors, actuators and device firmware.
- Interoperability & messaging: Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, event-driven infrastructure, protocol bridges and gateways.
- Infrastructure & self-hosting: homelabs, message brokers, storage, networking, monitoring, observability and data visualisation.
- Sensing & edge intelligence: local voice assistants, edge AI, computer vision, presence and occupancy detection.
- Energy: energy monitoring and optimisation, solar integration, batteries, smart EV charging and energy-aware automation.
- Privacy, security & resilience: local-first and offline operation, security, reliability, long-term maintainability and liberation of cloud-dependent devices.
- Real-world implementations: integrations across different layers, failures, trade-offs, migrations and lessons learned.

We particularly encourage presentations that explain the problem a project or technical approach solves, demonstrate integrations between open technologies, discuss standards and real-world interoperability, explain architectural choices and trade-offs, share operational experience and lessons learned, or provide reusable knowledge to the wider community.

Project introductions are welcome, especially where they help attendees understand an important part of the wider ecosystem. Proposals should go beyond a feature overview and explain the problem the project solves, where it fits in the smart-home stack, how it complements or integrates with other technologies, and what value it brings to users seeking more open, interoperable and controllable homes.

More information: https://raeymeister.github.io/FOSDEM_2027_SmartHomes_Devroom_cfp/