About me:
Name: Balu Babu
Bio: I like to make stuff.
Location: Bangalore
Personal site/LinkedIn: https://balubabu.dev
Home community: Absurd Industries, FOSS United
Years of association with FOSS/digital commons: 10 years. I first got involved with FOSS through my college’s FSMK chapter in 2016 and have been involved with open source in one form or another ever since.
About my work:
My first introduction to FOSS was through my college’s FSMK chapter in 2016. I started out helping people install Linux on their machines and getting people around me to try FOSS. Eventually, I started a robotics club in my college.
I started actively contributing to open source later through software. During my time at Hoppscotch, I contributed heavily to the project and its community, and since then I’ve contributed to a bunch of other software and hardware projects.
Somewhere along the way I became known as the “keyboard guy” in FOSS United, built and open sourced CoryDora, and started a unofficial keyboard club within the community. I’ve also given a bunch of talks, both at FOSS United and outside it, on everything from software to hardware and building things.
Over the last few years I’ve increasingly moved towards open hardware. I run Absurd Industries with a few friends, a maker community in Bangalore where we bring together people who build hardware, electronics, robots, keyboards and generally weird stuff.
How and when I came across the FOSS United community:
I’ve been attending FOSS United Bangalore since its very first public meetup, a homelabbing meetup organised by Vishal and held at DeepSource’s office. I’ve been part of the community since before most of the current staff joined FOSS United.
For a long time, I was the guy who showed up to almost every meetup. I knew most of the regulars, made a bunch of friends through the community and eventually started volunteering with the Bangalore chapter myself.
Over time I got more involved beyond the Bangalore meetups. I’ve been a reviewer for IndiaFOSS talks for the last 2-3 years. When Dev Rooms were introduced last year, I proposed and ran the Open Hardware Dev Room, and I’m running it again this year. I wanted hardware and the people building it to have a proper space within the larger FOSS community.
Why I am running for the Governing Board:
I care about FOSS United, but I think somewhere along the way we lost some of what made this community special in the first place.
I went from being the guy who showed up to almost every meetup to someone who hardly attends them anymore. The early meetups were messy, the topics were all over the place and half the fun wasn’t even the talks. It was knowing that every month you would meet your friends, discover somebody building something weird or end up arguing about some obscure technical thing. I remember rebase vs merge vs squash commits being a running debate amongst several of us for months, or all of us trying to figure out Slayer’s identity (If you know, you know). That kind of stuff was half the reason I kept showing up.
People became unofficial ambassadors for FOSS across Bangalore simply because they liked the community enough to keep bringing more people into it. I think that did more for FOSS than any amount of formal outreach ever could.
I’ve also heard “Talk is cheap. Show me the code” repeated within FOSS circles as an argument for focusing on the work and treating the community around it as secondary. I think that has aged rather poorly in a world where code is increasingly cheap. Getting people to care about FOSS, teach each other, argue about ideas, build things together and stick around for years is far more valuable to me.
I also think FOSS United could use a little more spine. I’ve seen people get uncomfortable with a talk simply because it had “Fuck Meta” in it and I think that instinct says something about where we’ve ended up. FOSS came out of people questioning how software was owned, controlled and distributed and I think there has always been something a little punk about it. We shouldn’t be afraid of disagreement or difficult conversations just because somebody might be unhappy with them.
I’d like to see FOSS United trust its community more, experiment more, take positions when they matter and become a place people feel genuinely attached to again. I’d rather try to help do that than keep complaining about it with my friends.
Why would I be a good fit (What prior long-term volunteering experience do you have):
-
I run Absurd Industries with a few friends, a maker community in Bangalore. Beyond our own meetups, we run workshops, gatherings, events and collaborations with other hardware and non-hardware communities, companies and organisations.
-
Started and ran my college’s robotics club.
-
Been part of FOSS United Bangalore since the beginning and later began volunteering with the chapter.
-
Reviewed IndiaFOSS talks for the last 2 years.
-
Proposed and ran the Open Hardware Dev Room for both years that Dev Rooms have existed.
-
Given talks and helped organise things across FOSS, hardware and maker communities.
Things I would like to focus on as a GB member:
I’ve already spoken a lot about this above, so keeping this short.
-
Put more focus back on the community and give chapters and community members more freedom to experiment, try weird things and occasionally fail.
-
Do more hands-on workshops, especially for students and people trying something for the first time. Workshops are logistically painful, I’ve learnt this firsthand running hardware workshops, but they’re also a really good way to get someone from “this looks interesting” to actually trying it.
-
Bring more open hardware, makers and people building physical things into FOSS United.
-
Explore FOSS outside the usual tech bubble. Humanitarian work, science, civic work, literature, art and so much more. One of my favourite talks at IndiaFOSS 2025 was literally a zoologist talking about using FOSS to map bird sightings and migration. I want more weird intersections like that.
-
There is so much happening in Bangalore across startups, research, hardware, maker communities, universities and other spaces that we barely interact with. I’ve been to Hacker House sessions that are literally just a bunch of people meeting at some random cafe in HSR, Koramangala or Indiranagar every week, and I’ve seen more things get built and more collaborations come out of those sessions than some formally organised events. I think there’s something we can learn from that.
-
Expand the kinds of talks and people we give a platform to. I don’t want FOSS United to just become another tech community.
-
Work more closely with communities that already exist instead of trying to build everything ourselves.
-
Be a little less afraid of taking a stand when it matters.
Optional: Anything else you’d like to share with the community. For instance, what impact or change do you want to bring about in the FOSS United or the Indian FOSS community?
I think our policies around Gen AI submissions are a little dumb. I understand the hesitation around Gen AI in CFPs. A lot of the very real problems that come with it, but I think there’s another side to this that we need to consider as well.
I’m not exactly known for being a huge fan of Gen AI either, but there’s a difference between using AI to manufacture expertise or ideas you don’t have and using it to fix your grammar, edit something you’ve written or help communicate your own ideas better.
Not everyone is a great writer, not everyone is particularly well read and not everyone can write like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle like some folks in FOSS apparently can. That shouldn’t stop someone with genuinely interesting work from submitting a good CFP.
I’ve used AI as an editing tool for pretty much every CFP I’ve submitted. The ideas and the work are still mine.
I think this goes back to something I’ve said throughout this nomination. We could stand to trust our community a little more.