This forum thread will be used to document conversations about partnerships that we have with other organizations and communities. These could be one-off meetings, or outcomes that come out of our presence at events.
Please refer to the threads from 2024 and 2025 for more context.
We had a talk (slides here) and a stand at FOSSASIA 2026. Our presence was centered mainly around FLOSS/fund advocacy and finding projects that could apply (there is not much to talk about FOSS United at international events, except for maybe IndiaFOSS - so all positive conversations there are a bonus!)
Here are some notes and updates from the event -
FLOSS/fund
VLC is aware of the fund and has been discussing about it internally. It might take some time for them to apply. IndiaFOSS 2026 is on their radar already, and they will most likely be attending.
Caught up with the Matrix folks. We’ve invited them to IndiaFOSS as well - they are interested in setting up a Matrix room for the conference.
I also met the CEO of Rust Foundation. They will have a discussion about FLOSS/fund internally, but are interested in the fundingjson experiment (highlighting FOSS funding requirements). Rust seems to be doing well in terms of fundraising, and I had a lot of questions on how they’ve gone about it. We will try to have a longer chat with them. I highly recommend checking out their talk on strategy in open source.
Also had FLOSS/fund related conversations with GNOME foundation, Debian, and other projects that were showcasing.
FOSS United
Linux Professional Institute (LPI) will be showcasing at Open Source India in November this year. They don’t have enough people on the ground and asked if FOSS United would like to co-exhibit at their stand. Should be very interesting; we’ve never had any presence at this event. Looks unlikely for them to attend IndiaFOSS, but we talked about the possibility of hosting some educational events during their trip to India.
One of the most interesting conversations was with Saad Chinoy, who’s based out of SG and runs multiple makerspaces there, and has done a lot of work in making Open hardware projects for disabled people. I had invited them to IndiaFOSS last year as well, but it looks much more likely because of the next point.
Met the people behind Gathering for Open Science Hardware. Saad and Marc (who also runs Hackteria - which was started out of BLR!) are the organisers of GOSH 2026, happening in Kathmandu, just the next weekend after IndiaFOSS. The timelines are perfect for us to become a co-organiser of the event, and help them promote it. They will most likely showcase at IndiaFOSS. We discussed ways that FOSS United can be of help. They were also super hearing about MOSAIC. Lots of fun work that we can do together, including hosting GOSH 27 in India.
Forklore conversations. Met several Indian maintainers ( Aurora store, mifos initiative).
Long chat with a FOSDEM organiser. I gave them context about our activities at the FOSDEM stand they don’t seem to have a problem with us showcasing other projects at our stand.
Grafana will return as IndiaFOSS sponsors and I asked them to consider going for a higher tier this time, with a booth. They were impressed by the event last year! They asked if there’s anything we can do together with the Grafana learning platform, and that they’d be happy to sponsor educational events that make use of this.
Lastly, I met Daniel Blueman(Numascale, and wifi.one). He wants to attend IndiaFOSS this year and help us with the wifi situation. He’s happy to bring hardware and help us setup our networking infra, and also just monitor the situation and tell us how we can improve things.
Update: Expenses were around 50k INR, including travel and stay.
I and @rahulporuri spent a week in Bangalore to attend some events, and also catch up with maintainers, sponsors, volunteers etc. Some of the things on our agenda with these meetings were IndiaFOSS 2026 sponsorships and Maintainer Programs. We’ve had a very long but productive week. Notes below
Aravinda is the creator of Sanka, Chitra, and maintains a bunch of other very cool FOSS projects.
His Kannada tooling projects have upwards of 50k users, and have recieved a great amout of local media attention. We were pleasantly surprised to know about the scale of the project.
We talked about a potential grant to support some of his previous work and maintainence of the project.
He is interested in helping organise a Kannada FOSS conference. We’ve had similar conversations with @Shree_Kumar and @PrashanthUdupa before and I am hoping we will see this shape up this year
Source Code Control
We met with Lakshmi from Source Code Control, who’s been an active member of the FOSS United community for many years now.
We’ve been working together on a Compliance Program for FOSS projects for some time, and this was piloted earlier this year, and will be plugged into the broader maintainer programs initiative.
We also discussed their presence at IndiaFOSS 2026, and activities that they can be part of including devrooms, pre-events, maintainer summit etc.
They are looking for feedback on an OSS audit tool that they’ve developed, and would like for more projects from the community to try it out.
ITforChange
The folks at IT4C are huge FOSS evangelists, and have done a lot of groundwork replicating the Kerala KITE model in schools in Karnataka, putting out research work etc.
We met with Guru and Chandra to discuss ways of working together.
They’ve been experimenting with ERPnext, and we told them we can put them in touch with some folks from our network to help with the configuration.
They have developed a customisation on top of antenna pod for podcasts, which is already being used by a lot of teachers. The software is open source and they want to see it get adopted by other orgs, and also add it to the apps marketplace.
We told them about the #IndiaRunsOnFOSS and forklore campaigns, and they’re happy to participate in both. (cc @ashlesh )
Guru is also currently working on a paper analysing the impact of FOSS in the Kerala education model
They are also working on a program to organise FOSS trainings at academic institutes in over 10 state governments.
Linux Foundation India
We first met Sridhar (Director, LFI) at MangaloreFOSS in January. We met up with him to discuss potential collaborations.
LF is interested in IndiaFOSS and wants to showcase some of their projects through booths at the conference.
They are also interested in supporting educational FOSS work - trainings, internship programs etc.
Sridhar is personallly interested in working with linguistic FOSS projects out of India.
Rainmatter Foundation
We had multiple meetings with the folks at RF to help them understand our work and figure out if there’s a way we can fit within the broader RF ecosystem (in their urban and data thesis).
The conversation mostly revolved around how we can work with their partners to push for Open Data creation.
RF works with very large organisations that have immense amounts of valuable data. If we are able to help them understand the FOSS ethos, this will be an incredible win for the overall ecosystem.
We also discussed how exactly to go about helping orgs adopt technology. This has to happen through a workshop model where we directly build capacity in the orgs, and not become a service provider who will build solutions for them.
We discussed expanding the scope of the T4GC/OASIS Insight Out program both in terms of regions and the orgs that attend, and what the next workshops could look like.
NSRCEL, IIMB
NSRCEL incubates a lot of startups, and our conversation was primarily around helping early stage startups adopt FOSS.
They invited Rahul to take a session on FOSS adoption for startups, which could then develop into broader FOSS adoption bootcamps (eg. a Frappe bootcamp)
They have developed a startup toolkit that lists down services that founders can get access to. A FOSS toolkit is something that a lot of people have asked us before about.
We also asked them to plan presence at IndiaFOSS.
Juspay and NammaYatri
Both companies have been active participants at IndiaFOSS
We wanted to help them understand the bigger picture and our mission in more detail, so we can work towards a regular engagement instead of one-off event sponsorships.
They are both interested in supporting the FOSS ecoystem, and want to engage with us on hiring etc. They will participate in IndiaFOSS again.
We discussed a potential OSM contribution program with namma yatri. They have a lot of data that they want to contribute upstream, and are happy to support programs around this. We will put them in touch with OSM folks.
Bruno
We discussed some of our upcoming maintainer programs plans with Anoop and Sreelakshmi from Bruno.
Bruno is one of the very few projects that has gone through all stages of what our maintainer program pipeline looks like, and is a sustainable company that is now supporting FOSS United.
Anoop gave a lot of useful feedback from both perspectives - things he would have liked to be supported on as a maintainer, and things that he would now like to get involved in through Bruno as an organisation.
He’s happy to give time to any FOSS projects that are looking to make it into a sustainable business.
They have already confirmed support for IndiaFOSS, but are also interested in supporting OSS projects, and diversity scholarships. We will write to them once we have the decks ready.
Events
Insight Out (OASIS/T4GC)
OASIS and T4GC organised an event to introduce the social sector to AI tools last Friday
Organisations were asked to come with problems and datasets, and we helped them play around with Google’s Antigravity.
Not any FOSS angle here as such, but it was great to see non technical folks imagine the possibilities of things they can do with these tools. Our broader takeaway was that building basic technical capacity in social sector orgs is now a solved problem. This is going to significantly reduce the information asymmetry that currently scares orgs away from tech, and they will now finally have to vocabulary to convey the things that they want built.
I pulled in @PrashanthUdupa@Shree_Kumar@Arun and Subhashish for a meeting at the sidelines of the meetup to discuss Maintainer Programs. Again, it was useful talking to maintainers directly and I was able to get a lot of meaningful feedbakc on how we can support maintainers.
The impromptu unconf at the end of the event also went to the topic of AI. There is clearly a lot of confusion and ambiguity about the future of Tech and FOSS amongst the community, and I think it is helpful for all of us to have these conversations even though there are no clear answers.
SAFAR - Gig workers board consultation
We were co-organisers of this consultation centered around the Gig workers act, rules and the new board that has now been set up in Karnataka.
Rahul gave a talk about how civic technology should look like, which really helped people understand the expectations they should have from these solutions.
Apart from this, there were several other interesting conversations around maintainer support, Tech for good, AI asssisted coding and the future of FOSS. Long week!
