FOSSC 2019 - Free and Open Source Software Conference (FOSSC)

The FOSSC-Oman’2019 Conference will be jointly organized by the Communication and Information Research Center at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), and the Information Technology Authority (ITA), on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to support the National Initiative on this theme. It will be for two days and aims to promoting development of free and open source software for professionals, staff, students, and the community in Oman. The FOSSC-Oman’2019 event is the Fourth edition of this conference which will be held every two years in Oman to offer ICT managers, professionals, developers, users and interested persons of FOSS a good opportunity to discover, discuss and exchange ideas on FOSS in Oman and beyond. The event will also provide the opportunity to network different groups of FOSS users, benefit from insightful lectures delivered at the conference, and share mutual experiences and discuss potential implementations of FOSS. The goal of this is to bring free and open software to Oman. The organizing committee is inviting managers, and individuals who have passion, students, educators and experts from companies, public and private organizations to share their successes in the vast array of free and open source software that is transforming information and communication technology across the globe.
The range of targeted topics is very broad, but priority is given to subjects on real world applications in home, education, research and business. Based on this, the program committee is inviting proposals for paper presentations, on any topic relevant to FOSS. We are looking for contributions on current trends and development in all areas of Free and Open Source Software. These include but not limited to the following:
· Business: Business models, new types of businesses enabled by open source.
· Innovation: Technical innovation driven by free software and open source, the tension between personal freedom and business interests.
· Public Sector: FOSS in government and public sectors such as health, transport, and education.
· Security and Privacy: Security in an always-on, pervasive computing environment and blockchain technologies.
· Best practices: Existing expertise and future demands of FOSS projects and products.
· Knowledge and Education: Creation, sharing and transferring knowledge, materials and tools.
· Applications and Algorithms: FOSS applications and algorithms (from consumer to enterprise).
· Hardware and Platforms: FOSS hardware and platforms including embedded, mobile, high performance open platforms.
· The Internet of Things: IoT, from individual sensors and controllers through to the cloud and big data/analytic software frameworks, communications, interoperability.
· Beyond the technology: Social, economic, commercial, open data, and leadership trends intersecting the open source world.
Contributions are selected based on their content by a conference program committee. We will favour submissions which fall under one of the aforementioned topics.
Contributions can be submitted in English as well as Arabic. The choice of language should depend solely on which language is more suitable for presenting the topic context. Language of submitted texts and the talk presentation should be the same.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: September 30th, 2018.
Notification of acceptance: November 30th, 2018.
Registration Opening: December 3rd, 2018.
Registration Closing: Jan 24th, 2019.
Conference date: 11th and 12th February 2019.