Flock to Fedora 2026: What to Expect in Prague

Flock to Fedora 2026 is heading back to Prague this June, and on episode 53 of the Fedora Podcast, Noah and I sat down with Justin Wheeler and Emma from the Fedora design team to talk through everything contributors and community members need to know.

For anyone who hasn’t been, Flock is the Fedora Project’s annual contributor conference — not a sales event, not a product launch, just the place where a global community of mostly volunteers gets together once a year to do real work, set direction, and remind themselves why they got into open source in the first place. Justin, who serves as Fedora Community Architect at Red Hat, described it well: it’s where you go to fuel up on the energy that carries you through the rest of the year. That tracks with my own experience. Some of the best conversations in open source happen at a table at midnight over bad food and good drinks.

The decision to return to Prague for a second consecutive year was a deliberate one. Travel anxiety into the US is real for a significant portion of the global Fedora community right now, and the Prague venue worked exceptionally well last year — accessible by train and plane, flexible space, and existing relationships with the hotel. Justin was transparent that this isn’t a new permanent model, just a practical call that let the team focus on improving the conference itself rather than rebuilding logistics from scratch in a new city.

The design theme for Flock 2026 is Alchemy, and Emma walked us through the research behind it. Prague’s history with alchemy traces back to Emperor Rudolph II, who brought Europe’s top alchemists to the city during his reign in the 1500s in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. The design team ran a community vote on potential themes and alchemy won, which gave them a rich visual direction — medieval manuscripts, heraldic imagery, the Fedora four foundations rendered as elemental colors radiating from a stone. Fedora’s Flock mascot Kulora returns dressed as an alchemist this year, searching not for the philosopher’s stone but for Fedora itself. Emma is also reworking the design process to build a shared asset library so newer contributors can pick up design tickets without starting from a blank canvas.

As for the schedule: the conference runs June 14th through 16th, Sunday through Tuesday. Sunday is “Day Zero” — an offline workshop day with no AV and no plenary sessions, just hands-on working time for teams and SIGs to actually get things done face to face. Day One and Day Two follow a mirror structure: one opens with a single plenary track then breaks into three simultaneous recorded breakouts after lunch, the other does it in reverse. Both days will be live streamed so remote attendees can follow along. Registration is free, but you need to sign up in advance to get food, swag, and a conference t-shirt — and based on what Emma described about the alchemy branding, you’re going to want the t-shirt. Financial aid is also available for those who need it.

You can register now at fedoraproject.org/flock2026 and hang out in the #flock:fedoraproject.org room on Matrix if you have questions. Hope to see some of you in Prague.