Docs at FOSDEM
Every year, FOSDEM in Brussels brings together the free and open-source software community for two days of talks. In 2025 and 2026, Virgile Deville — Product Manager of Docs — went there to present the project: how it's built, who funds it, and how it collaborates with the libraries it depends on.
Below are recordings of every talk, straight from the FOSDEM video archive.
Three talks in Brussels
Docs was covered from three angles: the product itself, the libraries it's built on, and where it fits in the Local First movement.
LaSuite Docs: open source collaborative documentation platform
A tour of Docs as a block-based, open-source editor built by the French and German governments: real-time collaboration, granular permissions, sub-documents, and a headless CMS API — and why it suits teams looking to build, manage, and scale documentation.
Building digital workplace solutions on top of foundational libraries
With Yousef El-Dardiry. How France and Germany fund core features — exports, comments, edit attribution, suggestions — directly into BlockNote and Yjs rather than into Docs alone, why funding libraries differs from funding applications, and what the whole ecosystem gains from it.
A Local First collaborative workplace?
A lightning talk introducing LaSuite, DINUM's MIT-licensed suite built around Docs, Drive, Meet, and an AI assistant, and its reusable UI Kit — offered as a resource for the Local First community building its own collaborative apps.
Where the European collaboration started
Note-Worthy Collaboration: Co-developing a Note-Taking Application
With Alexander Smolianitski and Yousef El-Dardiry. The story of the 100-day challenge where French and German product teams joined forces to co-develop a note-taking application for their respective public-sector suites, La Suite Numérique and openDesk — design decisions, technical implementation, and lessons learned.
Want to know more?
Read the roadmap, browse the source, or come talk to us directly.