As part of our mission to promote and support the Indian FOSS ecosystem, we meet and talk to people from the FOSS and FOSS-adjacent ecosystems throughout the year. Over the past year, we had conversations with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, software/tech communities, and more. Similar to 2024 Notes on partnership conversations, this forum thread will document conversations about partnerships with other organizations and communities. Please note that partnerships here refers to long-term partnerships e.g. potential multi-year long collaborations that improve the Indian FOSS ecosystem for the better instead of short-term engagements e.g. one-off meetup hosting or event community partnerships.
We (the FOSS United Foundation) are doing this to be transparent about who we are talking to and what we are talking about. We also hope documenting and sharing this information publicly might lead to serendipity.
Members of the FOSS United Community are also welcome to share information about partnerships in this forum thread.
P.S. I apologize for starting this thread late but I will try my best to add information about Q1 2025 here.
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On Day 2 of the Dasra Philanthropy Week, I participated in a panel discussion on “The Power of Open Source and Collaborative Technology for Social Change”. After this panel discussion, I interacted with a number of folks in the audience, one of whom was Purvi Shah, COO of Pratham Books. Purvi brought up their FOSS StoryWeaver platform, a digital platform that provides open access to multilingual storybooks for children. It has been open-source for many years and they were also recently recognized as a DPG by the DPG Alliance. She wanted to chat with us to understand how they could promote the FOSS-nature of the platform, seek new contributors, and think about long-term sustainability of the project. They had already applied for the FLOSS Fund.
On 17 March, Purvi, Amna, and Suman from Pratham Books and I had an hour-ish long conversation regarding how FOSS United could help with their Storyweaver platform. The backend is built using Rails, the frontend using React.js, and deployment happens using docker. As a not-for-profit, Pratham Books doesn’t have a set budget for regular upkeep of the project, because of which updates are infrequent (see GitHub repos). They wanted to understand how best to interact with the FOSS community.
We settled on a few different things by the end of the conversation
- as a distributed team, they could attend one of the FOSS United meetups, just to start interacting with the FOSS United community. They were happy to set aside time to interact with the community via meetups and it’s easier for us (FOSS United Community) to point them to the relevant people for longer conversations/potential contributions
- as a recognized DPG, they were interested in understanding if the financial sustainability of DPGs was any different than FOSS projects. I mentioned to them that I know Shailiza from Samagra who runs Code4GovTech and that she would be better to discuss things in the DPG ecosystem
- given their FLOSS Fund application, they were wondering if we could comment on it, and help improve it if possible
- given the ongoing IIIT-D student projects, we discussed the possibility of seeking students to pursue projects on Storyweaver in the future. They liked the idea and will work on putting together a list of improvements and potential projects related to Storyweaver, some experimental and some routine
- long-term, we wanted to build up to a meaningful engagement at IndiaFOSS, maybe a talk on the platform, a booth, etc
The good folks at Pratham Books are “passionate believers and advocates of open licensing” and most of their books are available under Creative Commons licenses. Given their focus on multilingual storybooks, their tech platforms have enabled book translation to hundreds of languages. They seem to be good citizens of the digital commons and it feels like a no-brainer to work with them long-term.
After a delay of almost a month (sorry), I put them in touch with Shailiza from Code4GovTech and Prof. KC from CSE, IITM. Their FLOSS fund application wasn’t approved in the first batch so I will be talking to the FLOSS fund team to understand how their application could be improved. I also invited them to MumbaiFOSS and the April BLR meetup - and a few team members will likely be attending both events.
Their backend is written in Ruby on Rails. I recently met Vipul, Founder of Saeloun and a long-term contributor of Ruby on Rails at FOSSMeet 2025 by NITC and at PuneFOSS 2025. I will try to put Vipul in touch with the the folks at Pratham Books because I’m definitely the wrong person to talk to regd RoR.
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I participated in two research studies over the past three months. This is because of my personal belief that academic involvement in the FOSS ecosystems needs to increase, which includes studies of the FOSS ecosystem.
- Satish from ThoughtWorks Coimbatore introduced me to SĂ©bastien Antoine. We discussed how I got into the software/tech/FOSS ecosystem and my experience in the software services industry. I put him in touch with @Siddharth_Shivkumar from MLH, ex-TCS
- @knadh forwarded a request from Praharshita Krishna, PhD regarding a study on developer popularity and sponsorship on GitHub for FOSS communities. I put her in touch with @vishnu @ Ente, Gurpreet @ Bahmni, and @rushabh from Frappe
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@knadh introduced Pranav Prabhu, OASIS and me to a few folks from Dasra. Dasra is “a leading nonprofit systems orchestrator working with diverse stakeholders across the social impact ecosystem.”. Pranav and I had a conversation with a couple of folks from Dasra to understand how we could work together e.g. co-organize events, share our (FOSS United & Dasra) experience using/applying FOSS with civil society organizations.
Towards the end of the call, they invited me to take part in a panel discussion at the Dasra Philanthropy Week on “The Power of Open Source and Collaborative Technology for Social Change”.
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