2026 Notes on Partnership Conversations/Presence at events

Organisation
4

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 VK

  • 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 :slight_smile:

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.

MOSAIC Science Sante and FOSS United BLR meetup

  • Lots of interesting conversations at both events.
  • 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!

6 Likes