Great question @Anand_Baburajan ! I hope you join the call on Sunday so that we can talk about this further but here are my thoughts. I don’t think we have answers to these questions at the Foundation so these answers are what I’m able to come up with right now
- (1) to promote the spirit of hacking and tinkering
It is difficult, if not impossible, to track progress towards this goal. But, I think all of us can sense the lack of such a spirit. For example, a few meetups in the Technology community feel extremely formal and constraining. There is no breathing room beyond what is strictly prescribed by the organizing team.
In my mind, the spirit of hacking and tinkering is in enjoying and celebrating the process more than the outcomes. And we can usually read the room to tell if the community is informal or too formal.
- (2) to build quality FOSS for public good
This is relatively easier to track, when compared to the earlier goal. This goal involves two distinct things - building new FOSS projects of quality and improving the quality of existing FOSS projects
Thanks to the FOSS Grants program, we have some insights into the quality of new FOSS being built in the country. As a community, we also share with each other new FOSS projects all the time, and peeking into them also gives us an idea of their quality. Simply counting the number of quality Grant requests we receive should suffice for the short term.
Setting new projects aside, there are already a ton of FOSS projects that were created in India - some of which might not be of the highest quality. Here, we are trying to work with the community to create guidelines that we can share with existing FOSS projects to help them improve their quality (see [Request for Comments] Recommendations for FOSS Hack (and future) Partner Projects). We could take the help of FOSS grant recipients to regularly update the guidelines. After we give advice (e.g. publicly via GitHub issues) to a project, keeping track of how many projects actually followed through on the guidelines to improve their quality sounds like a reasonable metric here.
- (3) to evangelise the use of FOSS in different sectors.
I just realized that our (FOSS United Foundation) life would be simpler if we asked the speakers (at conferences and meetup) to identify the domain/subdomain that their FOSS talk pertains to. Then we could just create a word cloud showing all of the different sectors/domains/subdomains that our speakers have covered. At that point, all we need to do is to simply identify missing domains and look for relevant FOSS speakers.
At the moment, even though we don’t have easy to access data to back my point, I think we’re doing a reasonably good job evangelising FOSS use across different sectors. A look at IndiaFOSS 3.0 or any of the other talk recordings available on YouTube demonstrates the variety of sectors/domains that we have been able to pull speakers from.
What do you think?
Thanks for the question again @Anand_Baburajan . I think we (FOSS United Community) should write these things down in a City Chapter Charter to ensure that the volunteers organising an event keep these things in mind.