Welcome to the Nix Village CFP! Note that we have two types of CFP this year: a standard call for presentations and a call for projects.

We have some space for people to show off their projects instead of giving presentations. If you have a cool Nix related thing you want to demo at con, we have the space (and, perhaps, the infrastructure) for you. Our NOC will connect with you beforehand to see how we can tie your project in.

The application is the same for both, so read on...

Agency

DEF CON's theme this year is Agency, take a second to read about it here:

So much is stacked against us having, using and maintaining our digital self-determination:

• Dark patterns embedded in apps circumvent our will, hijacking our focus.
• Tech giants conspire to shrink our pool of options for information and communication while their algorithms maximize rage engagement and spread deliberate disinformation and bot content.
• Without reliable and trustworthy information we cannot make free and informed choices.
• If we can't communicate with each other without fear that our communications will be collected and turned against us, we can't connect with each other honestly.
• Without that connection, we are atomized and weakened.

Reclaim power over your tech

While we are still hard at work on our art and village theme this year, we would like to challenge you to submit talks and projects that answer to our take on the DEF CON theme:

• Starve the beast: How can you use Nix and NixOS to reclaim your digital agency?
• Feed your community: How can we support others doing the same by rolling our own tools and build infrastructure?
• Resources, time, and energy: How can we use Nix to connect ordinary users with the developers who made all the software they depend on?

Ideas

Maybe you want to show us how you can get NixOS or Nix running on weird things, both large and small. Maybe NixOS can restore life to hardware that would be thrown away, or potentially be used to solve problems on huge hyperscale systems. If Nix fixed you having free time, we want to hear about it whether you're an embedded developer, Linux hobbyist, or wrangler of clusters.

At the same time, we want to know the limits. Computers aren't always correct, despite Nix claiming to create an island of determinism. Nix doesn't fix hardware vulns (or can it)? Can fetching closures from a binary cache be fingerprinted? Are there side channels to the build sandbox? Can you break the tools that we build things with every day?

These are only some ideas, and we're excited to hear yours. Get inspired and get creative, and maybe look at what we did last year. We'll have more for you soon.

FAQ

Are we going to sponsor accepted badges this year?

We'll see where we are once our sponsors are more finalized, but we'll try 😄

Submissions close on 2026-06-15 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles), 2 months, 1 week from now.