2026.pgconf.dev will be held from May 19-22, 2026 at the Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University, and the call for papers and call for sponsors are now open. This event cannot occur without the generous support of sponsors, and we are particularly grateful to sponsors who can sign up early, so that we can be confident that the event is on a sound financial footing and turn our focus to programming and logistics. As usual, the 2026 event will feature two full days of talks on Wednesday and Thursday, and just like last year, we are accepting proposals for both 25-minute talks and 50-minute talks. In addition, Friday will once again be an unconference day, with the sessions chosen on the day of the event by the attendees. Tuesday, however, will be organized differently in 2026.

In the past, PGConf.dev and its predecessor, PGCon, typically scheduled half-day meetings on Tuesday targeting a limited number of attendees. For example, in 2025, Tuesday included a developer meeting, an extension ecosystem summit, a community summit, and an advanced patch feedback session. The developer meeting was by invitation only, and the other events had limited capacity and required pre-registration. This year, while some Tuesday sessions will remain closed or require advance signup, we also want to offer open sessions so that any registered attendee can participate on Tuesday. Also, we would like to schedule Tuesday in smaller increments, so that people need not decide between attending an event for a full 3 hours or skipping it entirely.

In order to accomplish these goals, we need many more people to propose content for Tuesday. It’s actually that simple. We’ve already talked with the organizers of last year’s Extension Ecosystem Summit and Community Summit about splitting those into multiple shorter sessions, allowing attendees to choose which ones to join. Similarly, instead of one long developer meeting, we hope PostgreSQL developers will propose shorter, topic-focused meetings. Such meetings can be submitted as “community discussion sessions,” as detailed in the call for papers, and can be open to all, closed to a specific group, or can be structured as a working group, which is somewhere in between a fully open session and a fully closed one. Community discussion sessions can also be proposed on topics other than core PostgreSQL development; for example, maintainers of drivers or extensions could propose to meet with each other, or we can arrange space for meetings on general PostgreSQL community topics that are not specifically development-related.

In addition, we hope that Tuesday will feature workshops and panel discussions; once again, details are in the call for papers. Workshops are a great opportunity to educate the next generation of PostgreSQL developers – and not just core developers, but also extension developers, driver maintainers, and developers of other software that forms part of the PostgreSQL ecosystem. At the same time, it’s important to remember that not everyone who attends PGConf.dev is a developer, or wants to be a developer. Many attend to engage with the developer community rather than join it directly.. Panel discussions can help foster that engagement -- offering insight into how developers think and work, while also giving developers a chance to hear and respond to broader community perspectives. Our goal is to make Tuesday interactive and engaging for everyone in the Postgres community.

Of course, developing high-quality proposals for workshops and panel discussions will require considerable work and thought, and so the success of this new structure for Tuesday will depend very much on the willingness of members of the community to put in the time to create great content. We invite you to submit your best ideas, and to encourage your fellow community members to do the same. As always, if you have any questions, please reach out to us at contact@pgconf.dev!