@Anand_Baburajan and Sreelakshmi Jayarajan joined the call this past weekend (along with @ansh and @mangesh_x0 from the team).
Anand kicked off the discussed by asking if the quality of projects at FOSS Hack would be indicative of the spirit of hacking and tinkering. In my opinion, the spirit of tinkering and hacking needs to be pervasive e.g. in the meetups, the student clubs, at the IndiaFOSS conference, and the FOSS Hack.
Specifically, Anand and Sreelakshmi highlighted that a number of FOSS Hack projects die after the hackathon ends and they we were wondering how to promote long-term FOSS development via the Hackathon. They agree that for a large number of participants, hacking over a weekend to create something is definitely beneficial and educational to a number of participants. Anand and Sreelakshmi also gave their personal opinions that are relevant here - Anand was one of the winners of FOSS Hack 3.0 (FOSS Hack 3.0: Results) and Sreelakshmi was a GSoC participant last year and is a GSoC mentor this year.
We discussed a few different things that we could do to enable long-term FOSS creation and development via the Hackathon
- tweak messaging around the Hackathon to highlight long-term FOSS that was created or augmented during FOSS Hack e.g. Raven, Samay (Kukkee that @Anand_Baburajan built last year)
- tweak messaging to winners or runners up of the Hackathon regarding potential long-term support if the creators are able to maintain it for a few months
- revisit projects after a delay e.g. 3 months after Hackathon and if the project is still active and maintained, financially incentivize the creators/maintainers e.g. via a small FOSS Grant
- highlight the activity on the project via the community to showcase long-term FOSS development
Sreelakshmi brought up the “First Commit” program that @Devdutt started a few years back and highlighted how it helped her get started on a meaningful FOSS contribution journey. We mentioned that “First Commit” was coming back as “Season of Commits”, similar in some ways to GSoC. As a participant last year and a mentor this year, Sreelakshmi has a couple of observations about the GSoC program that we should be wary of
- Financial support for GSoC participants is potentially unsustainable e.g. 3000 USD for major contributions and 1500 USD for minor contributions isn’t something that an Indian entity like FOSS United will be able to replicate or should replicate. A number of potential GSoC students who don’t get selected choose to walk away from the project instead of contributing to the project free of cost. Onboarding new contributors is a major expense for projects so losing contributors who are already onboarded because they weren’t chosen for GSoC is hard to swallow.
- A large number of students are interested in GSoC because it helps their professional journey e.g. they get to highlight their FOSS contributions on their resumes. Because of this, they don’t continue being a part of the FOSS project. This causes even more churn for FOSS projects that could use less of it.
We thanked for them for joining the call and for an interesting discussion around how we can improve the FOSS ecosystem in India.
@Anand_Baburajan and Sreelakshmi, please correct me if I got parts of our conversation wrong or add details where I missed them (I’m reasonably sure I missed details about our hour-long chat).