Budget and planning for FY 25-26

[rushabh]

Since this was not posted publicly, I think we should disclose the budget and numbers for this year like we did last year.

Also I think each of the staff members need to share what will they “deliver” for the salaries they get and how will this be reported to the community / donors. I don’t think we did a good job of this last year, but we should improve this year.

Also maybe each staff member should share their “self review” of their own contributions / performance last year.

FOSS United is run more like an NGO than a movement, and I think we should expect professionalism at that level. Everyone would be at a loss if no one asks for accountability.

edit: I have ~18 years experience in running an organisation, these things are not as hard as they seem but yet few organisations do this well. Happy to help if anyone needs it.

[fossdot]

Hi Rushabh, Thanks for reminding.

I missed to post here earlier.

Expenses

Operations
Salary	11,993,333
Travel	750,000
Server Bills	200,000
Office Expenses	500,000
Miscellaneous	500,000
Accounting	500,000
Health Insurance	500,000
	14,943,333
Programs
IndiaFOSS	500,000
FOSS Hack	500,000
Season of Commits	500,000
City Communities	750,000
FOSS Clubs/Studnet Activities	1,000,000
Public Policy	750,000
Event Grant	200,000
FOSS Grant	2,500,000
	6,700,000
Total Expense	21,643,333

Salary
1	Rahul	3,000,000
2	Vishal	2,133,333
3	Ashlesh	1,320,000
4	Ansh	1,200,000
5	Harsh	1,000,000
6	Ruchika	800,000
7	Jeswin	800,000
8	Hari	500,000
9	Interns	240,000
10	SDE yet to hire	1,000,000
	Total	11,993,333

Income

Company Name	Amount
Samagata	8,871,667
Zerodha	8,871,667
Frappe	2,400,000
The Commit Company	500,000
Sensibull	1,000,000
Total Income	21,643,334

Regarding the SOP and self review, I will start with this and request team members to post the same.

[rushabh]

Thanks @fossdot for the update. Would also like the following to be answered:

1. How does the team measure its impact?
2. How does pay get set?
3. How does performance get reviewed?
4. How does accountability happen for non performing staff?
5. What impact did FOSS United create in the last year?
6. How are we going to measure the impact in the current year?
7. What are the broad goals for this year?
8. How will quality get measured?

[fossdot]

We can definitely share (5) and (7) but we don’t have any written methods/policies to measure impact, salary increments, reviews, and quality measures. But we should work on it.

We never attempted to work on this in the first 4 years of the foundation or even last year, as we were growing, and since you were also part of the foundation as a director then, so you can comment on it. But now feels like the right time to do it as we’ve grown enough to have these systems.

I was wondering we might be able to get help from the community to work on methods/policies for measuring impact, salary increments, reviews, and quality measures, since none of our current full-time staff has experience in setting this up - no one has held a leadership position at an organization before.

Would you be willing to guide us through this? Your experience would be incredibly valuable.

[ashlesh]

Also I think each of the staff members need to share what will they “deliver” for the salaries they get and how will this be reported to the community / donors. I don’t think we did a good job of this last year, but we should improve this year.

Also maybe each staff member should share their “self review” of their own contributions / performance last year.

I personally think this is over the top, rather performative and in the long run problematic/counterproductive.

While accountability to the community and donors is super essential and something we should strive for, asking individuals to publicly justify their worth and what they “deliver” for the salaries they get is not how you fulfill this goal. This is not professional.

A better and more professional way is looking at the foundation’s output collectively, measuring it against set agenda and charter,

• Yearly plans are a good start, we did make one this year, and we should see it through. Some civil society also lay out 4 year plans and set broader directions.
• Better and consistent reporting on what work is happening, as in form of quarterly calls and improved annual reports. We talk about what work happened, what did not and why, and what can be improved upon.
• Ensuring the foundation has workplace policies and accountability structures in place internally.

In my limited years of working as a professional, how it usually goes around is: individual workers are accountable to the organisation, and the organisation is accountable to the community/donors.

The organisation should strive for accountablity and transparency. And there are many smart and professional ways to do it, unfortunately what you’ve suggested, is not one of them.

[rushabh]

@fossdot

Would you be willing to guide us through this? Your experience would be incredibly valuable.

Have already signalled my interest - I have also put my heart and soul into FOSS United, not just money. Let me know how you want to engage.

@ashlesh

The organisation should strive for accountablity and transparency. And there are many smart and professional ways to do it, unfortunately what you’ve suggested, is not one of them.

Sure, why don’t you suggest something. Right now it seems like there is ZERO accountability and transparency. Not sure how sustainable that is. Maybe it will go on for a year or two as long as there are benevolent donors. Other than the events (and that too IndiaFOSS, which should ideally pay for itself), I really don’t see what value does FOSS United add. (Maybe there is work done but it isn’t communicated well enough)

At minimum the organisation should be able to report to the donors what value it has created in some measurable terms (both qualitative and quantitative).

[rahulporuri]

@rushabh

Other than the events (and that too IndiaFOSS, which should ideally pay for itself), I really don’t see what value does FOSS United add. (Maybe there is work done but it isn’t communicated well enough)

@rushabh do you really not see what value FOSS United adds other than the events? Reports summarize the work, but our work has been more public over the past year than ever before

• newsletters have been going out consistently, and we’ve been updating the blog newsletter
• we have posted grants updates via blogposts at Grants and shared them via socials, the newsletters, and via the IM groups
• we have consistently tried to communicate the process of setting up and electing a governing board via posts at Organization and multiple forum discussions, open community calls, etc
• we wrote about experimental programs at FOSS United via blogposts like We Started Talking About FOSS in Tamil and Things Got Interesting or forum posts like FOSS and Software Engg education
• there were a total of 21 blogposts before April 2024 and we added 32 more blogposts since then
• our social media account following on LinkedIn, Instagram, X/Twitter, Mastodon have grown because we have been consistently active on them. X/Twitter following grew by 20% (5473 to 6607), LinkedIn following grew by > 60% (7797 to 12851), Mastodon following grew by > 25% (288 to 365), Instagram following grew by > 35% (2631 to 3645) - and this happened because we have been consistently talking about our work and promoting FOSS
• our YouTube channel subscriber count grew by more than 150% (from 2850 to 7830). See https://fossunited.org/files/IndiaFOSS%202024%20Sponsorship%20Deck.pdf for the previous years numbers
• number of FOSS User Profiles grew from 769 on or before 1 May 2025 to 16,978
• number of signups to this forum grew by 94% (778 to 1.5K), and number of new contributors grew by 37% (160 to 219)
• we have organized more collaborative meetups over the past year with FOSS/software/tech communities across the country like MumPy, OSDG @ IIIT H, Software Freedom Day 2024 and 2025 (11 other communities in Tamil Nadu), Chennai React, SFLC.in, FSF, JSLovers than we did before 2024
• we have promoted more FOSS and digital commons events by other communities like RootConf, Devconf.in, conf.kde.in, Barcamp Bengaluru, ADCx India, OASIS, OSM Delhi than we did before 2024
• overall, we organized, promoted, and collaborated on 130+ events since April 2024 and 87 events before April 2024. all of which is visible on https://fossunited.org/events/timeline
• IndiaFOSS 2024 received 238 proposals, and IndiaFOSS 2025 received 338 proposals
• 6 reviewers from the FOSS United community reviewed proposals for IndiaFOSS 2024, and we have more than 15 reviewers helping review proposals for IndiaFOSS 2025
• More than 1200 proposals have been submitted to FOSS United events, and more than 10,000 people registered to participate in a FOSS United event since April 2024
• we provided scholarships to 18 students and professionals to pursue the Takshashila GCPP Tech & Policy scholarship since April 2024, documented on Technology+Policy course scholarship for FOSS devs, one of whom is the IndiaFOSS co-chair, at least 3 of whom are regular participants at FOSS United events, and one of whom is organizing a devroom at IndiaFOSS 2025
• the number of 30-day unique visitors to the new forklore.in initiative is 1.87K when fossunited.org unique visitors are 4.94K over the same period (> 35% of fossunited.org visitor numbers). 38 Indian FOSS maintainers and creators chose to participate in forklore.in

Why has the participation in the FOSS United community increased over the past year if we weren’t providing value back to the Indian FOSS community? And why are people participating in FOSS United events throughout the year instead of only IndiaFOSS, unless they found value in it?

When all of this information is available publicly and our public activity has increased over the past year, why do you say this? Why “Other than the events (and that too IndiaFOSS)”, as if the other events aren’t valuable to the community? And why “maybe” when there is abundant public activity?

[rushabh]

Thanks @rahulporuri for the update.

So breaking down your post:

1. Events - Other than IndiaFOSS, I assume most of the other events are collaborations and community run events. FOSS United provides a platform (which is a great asset).
2. Social media - Agree, there is definitely more activity - I always question if social media is a fundamental metric of success.
3. Policy - Other than grants, has there been any other success? Do we even have a “consensus mechanism” for picking policy goals (or not picking) that we have debated on forever?
4. Grants - There are many other sources now, specially with floss.fund - How are FOSS United grants any different?

Either ways, I don’t see a structure in any of the “verticals” that you have defined. What are the goals for this year for events, education, media, policy, etc.? Are there milestones, are these well documented? What is the “roadmap” for the platform? How far have we reached? What about outreach and reaching to more industry partners? Why are there no industry partners other than Frappe and Zerodha? These are the answers I am looking for.

[mangesh]

I don’t think social media, talk proposals, blogposts or anything you’ve mentioned is a good metric to measure impact.

Those who want to read the main part, can just skip these below bullet points.

Here’s some of my observations.

1. When I used to help @Ruchika with newsletters, I’ve pointed out it to her multiple times about the clicks and views on the newsletters. I don’t know what’s the case now, but I don’t think anyone reads those newsletters. Maybe, you could upload a proof from Listmonk Dashboard and prove me wrong with respect to the present.
2. Regarding the Meta Monkeys podcast and FOSS in Tamil thing, its 100% true that the podcast and talking about it in Tamil got a lot of eyeballs. They weren’t eyeballs with long term vision. It was just talking in front of the Camera. This year ChennaiFOSS didn’t even happen and we’re half way through the year and there’s still no planning about the Event. Meetups seem to be the only ones happening.
3. Do you think counting the number of talk proposals for IndiaFOSS is a good metric ? All of us know the growing number of AI generated talk proposals in the recent years.
4. Sign ups, I don’t think FOSS United is a product based or service based company to count analytics about sign ups and guest → user conversion. It’s fair for someone like Frappe, Zerodha or Ente to think about guest → signed in user conversion rates.
5. To someone who has seen the FOSS world pre-2020 and after the “FOSS Boom post 2021”, it’s no surprise that every college student wants to call himself a “FOSS Enthusiast” whereas they don’t even know any background. I find it very hard to explain FOSS and the community or even the old days to those college students carrying the tag of “FOSS Enthusiast”.
6. FOSS Profiles? the project is long dead, its not even usable in current times. Rather, I don’t think anyone is ambitiously creating FOSS Profiles the way @Harsh_Tandiya imagined they would.
7. Growing the FOSS ecosystem in India and growing FOSS United’s social media accounts are like North and South Pole on the globe. Unrelated in my honest opinion.

[Raw thoughts]
Currently, I can’t really fathom by what I mean when I say the word “impact”. It surely, isn’t what you mentioned above, but I can’t really say. This is not impact, impact is like a butterfly effect of kindness being shared and passed on.

I don’t know if you remember your conversation with Rushabh in Frappe Build on Day 2 morning. That was probably the best explanation of “impact”, “goal” or “vision” of an NGO like FOSS United I ever heard from anyone in the community. Other than me (I joined Ente, and then Frappe), Keerthana (she joined Ente through Ansh) and Swastik (to whom FOSS United referred for a role in Lambdatest) how many others were able to join and build for FOSS companies in the last 3 years of FOSS United’s rapid growth ? Shouldn’t that be a good metric to judge upon ? Imagine 10 teenagers joining Open Source Product companies every month through FOSS United’s connections. FOSS United literally becomes the talent and hiring ground for companies in and out of India. Forget the recent IIIT internships, most of the PR’s were not a good fit. Soon enough, companies like Boeing (they came in 2023 to the Open Source India Event) and other Multi National Corps show interest in the free software created by students/professionals and hire based on their projects and not “Data structures” problems. Shouldn’t that be the first priority of the organization ? By the way, MNC’s is just an example here.

FOSS Clubs is near to dead with 0 impact in the colleges, I don’t think its the subsequent clubs like GDSC’s killing the FOSS Clubs. I don’t think its money, its probably wrong leaders getting chosen for the leading the FOSS Clubs.

In my honest opinion, now it just looked like a media company giving reports of their analytical data to some of their Venture Capitalist investor.

[ansh]

how many others were able to join and build for FOSS companies in the last 3 years of FOSS United’s rapid growth ?

Here is a non exhaustive list of organizations that we have worked with or are talking to for hiring from within the FOSS United community, apart from the ones you already mentioned -

• Zerodha Tech
• Tiger Analytics
• True Beacon
• Bruno
• Juspay (they were at IndiaFOSS 2024 for hiring and got triple digit applications. They were able to close multiple openings and are returning to IndiaFOSS 2025 as a sponsor.
• Plane
• Tech4Good Community
• Scribbler
• Mecha
• Tooljet
• Othor
• Testzeus

At least half of these companies were able to close their openings in very short durations, and several others went ahead and interviewed the candidates we had referred. At times when we can’t think of people to refer, we still try our best to spread word about the opening wherever possible.

A slightly more detailed blog post on this should come out soon. Unfortunately getting testimonials from orgs that have hired through us has been a tedious process.

Shouldn’t that be a good metric to judge upon ? Imagine 10 teenagers joining Open Source Product companies every month through FOSS United’s connections. FOSS United literally becomes the talent and hiring ground for companies in and out of India.

This is a good point. A hiring program at FOSS United is in the works. We now have a huge network of companies that are actively hiring, and of volunteers/community members whom we’ve known for perhaps even several years now (and can easily vouch for their skills - not just technical but even teamwork etc.)

Ideally this will also tie up nicely with the upcoming FOSS pledge revamp, FOSS clubs, Season of Commits etc.

Shouldn’t that be the first priority of the organization ?

Nope. The hiring program is a good long term goal but I wouldn’t make it my first priority. There is no dearth of hiring platforms, and each of them started with similar visions.

In my honest opinion, now it just looked like a media company giving reports of their analytical data to some of their Venture Capitalist investor.

Currently, I can’t really fathom by what I mean when I say the word “impact”. It surely, isn’t what you mentioned above, but I can’t really say. This is not impact, impact is like a butterfly effect of kindness being shared and passed on.

Exactly, so how else do we measure impact? Butterfly effects are by nature difficult to quantify.

If the governance board/community/donors can propose a framework to measure impact, we can try to report on it. But if not, sharing all the numbers we have is the most we can do right?

---

On impact/vision/mission

I also haven’t been able to find clear answers to the long term mission/vision of FOSS United. I won’t be surprised if everyone inside and outside the team has their own mission statements for the org. From my experience of being associated with the org for 2 years (volunteer,intern,full-timer), I have tried to come up with certain broad goals of the foundation for my own reference and have also tried to put existing programs in these buckets -

• Enabling the creation and sustenance of quality FOSS in India - The grants program should evolve to something much larger than just payouts. We can help grantees not just with money but time, connections, branding, community building, hiring, fundraising, discoverability etc. This has started happening to some extent already. Events, Grants and even our Tech Policy efforts fit in this vertical.

• Ensuring bettter engineers come out of India - There is enough discourse around the problems with the Indian education system. FOSS events act as a good first step to spread awareness. Setting up tinker spaces (can just be a classroom), integration of FOSS in the curriculum (along with provision of academic credits for FOSS activities), access and visibility to the Indian FOSS ecosystem and projects/maintainers, programs to contribute to FOSS ,a hiring pipeline which shows students they don’t always have to go to big tech etc. are good long term goals IMO. FOSS Clubs, our FOSS &S/W engg efforts, Season of Commits, FOSSHack, Hiring Program fit into this vertical.

• Enabling discourse around FOSS policy in India - Building credibility for FOSS United and forming partnerships with industry, academia and policy makers helps us build a voice in important policy discussions. We also need to ensure we nurture more FOSS policy advocates who defend and advocate for the FOSS movement at the larger stage. The NLS study, ESP, GCPP scholarships all fit into this vertical. As highlighted multiple times before, policy work is a slow process and naturally difficult to highlight alongside output metrics for other programs.

[rahulporuri]

@mangesh

Currently, I can’t really fathom by what I mean when I say the word “impact”. It surely, isn’t what you mentioned above, but I can’t really say. This is not impact, impact is like a butterfly effect of kindness being shared and passed on.

@rushabh asked for quantitative value, so I shared the numbers. If stories are what you’re looking for, here are a few

• 14-year-old Advay talked about his experience learning and teaching Blender at a recent Bengaluru meetup. Watch his talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=154pqz_T3pE. Prashanth Udupa, his father, and we were talking about featuring Scrite on Forklore. One thing led to another, and we spoke to Advay about sharing his experience at the meetup. He also submitted proposals to IndiaFOSS 2025
• @syeda_fiza_fatima , an MBA student interested in technology, participated in a Hyderabad meetup last year. She liked the experience and volunteered during the Jan 2025 meetup. She convinced her college to host the Feb 2025 meetup. She joined us as an intern for the past two months, creating community health dashboards, such as this one: Frappe Insights
• Thanks to the interest around the FOSS in Science devroom, a few of us (shoutout to @agriyakhetarpal and @aditi_juneja ) are restarting the SciPy India conference this year. The conference has had an immeasurable impact on FOSS usage in the Indian Scientific Computing community and we are excited to be restarting it
• @prasun_anand gave a lightning talk about zasper at the Jan 2025 Hyderabad meetup, received a grant from FOSS United, and now has 1800+ users from around the world. “A core contributor from the Jupyter and academic computing (UC Berkeley) community just filed issues, contributed code, and started a thoughtful discussion on our repo.” - recent quote from @prasun_anand
• when @Shrirang_Kahale reached out to us, asking for a grant, the albony mirror network was averaging 200 TB per year. In June 2026, the Delhi node alone averaged 16 TiB transmitted, making it easier for all of us in India to get our ISOs and more
• @grittypuffy joined Ente recently. She is also an active volunteer in the Chennai community and a volunteer for IndiaFOSS 2025
• @Shree_Kumar added new functionality to GitHub - shreekumar3d/jigita: Ease PCB assembly with 3D printed jigs during FOSS Hack 2025 and Joshua created GitHub - radiantly/Wireview: Browser-based packet viewer powered by Wireshark during FOSS Hack 2025. They would have likely done these things even if there was no FOSS Hack but I would like to think that FOSS Hack helped a little
• At least 6 (or maybe all 7) of the students who participated in FOSS and Software Engg education contributed to a FOSS project for the first time. Two web/digital accessibility professionals who talked to the accesibility team commended them on their work and asked them to apply for internships with their company after graduating
• Prof. Jalote @ IIIT D is happy with the overall experience last semester, and he is happy to become a positive reference if we want to talk to other faculty members to teach software development through FOSS projects/contributions
• thoughtworks has consistently supported us as a venue partner across the country - thoughtworkers were central to starting the Coimbatore community, and we used Thoughtworks offices in Coimbatore, Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad to host meetups over the past year
• Tiger Analytics, that @ansh mentioned earlier, also hosted meetups in their Chennai office twice and want to organize more
• Thanks to a device grant, trainees of aikyam fellows were able to get laptops, which they used to setup FOSS tools for social impact e.g. create websites for NGOs. Earlier, the trainees were sharing a laptop or using a computer center to do this work after their training program finished
• VGLUG continues to do teach FOSS to hundreds of students in schools and colleges in Villipuram, Tamil Nadu
• @fossdot organized a workshop for the students at Navgurukul Kishanganj campus , and the students are primarily girls from underprivileged backgrounds
• 47 students attended IndiaFOSS 2024 as diversity scholarship recipients. The forum thread contains quotes from the recipients directly. All of them were exposed to FOSS for the first time at the conference
• Thanks to a grant, @contrapunctus is organizing OSM mapping sessions at FOSS United meetups across the country. A recent mapping party in Mumbai had the most number of participants and most women participants ever in India
• Bruno is joining us as a Platinum sponsor for IndiaFOSS 2025, and (correct me if I’m wrong @Anoop_M_D) they are doing this because of the “impact” that we had on the Bruno project over the past two years
• Faculty at the AI & ML Dept, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune, and St. Joseph’s College, Chennai are working on adopting FOSS Tools into the courses that they teach
• @prerak_singh was contributing to PyDataStructs before we got involved and he continues to contribute to the project as a Season of Commits participant this year. He has been sharing his updates regularly at https://prex03.github.io/

^ most of the above stories were shared on Telegram/IM channels, discourse forum, social media channels, newsletter, etc. Do these stories count as the “butterfly effect of kindness being shared and passed on” that you mentioned earlier? I am likely forgetting a lot of stories and the individual city chapters/student clubs likely have even more stories that we (Foundation) have never heard about.

@mangesh

This year ChennaiFOSS didn’t even happen and we’re half way through the year and there’s still no planning about the Event. Meetups seem to be the only ones happening.

@mangesh , ChennaiFOSS is being planned for late this year. There is no deadline for CityFOSS conferences, right? Or a mandate that they have to happen during Q1 or Q2?

@mangesh

[Raw thoughts]

Adding “Raw thoughts” doesn’t absolve you from making categorically false statements. For instance,

@mangesh

FOSS Clubs is near to dead with 0 impact in the colleges

The FOSS club activity at SIT Pune is the reason why the AI & ML Dept head asked me to talk about FOSS & AI to the faculty members.

[safwan_samsudeen]

This thread seems to be devolving , which is a pity because the original point is an important one - how is the money getting spent?

The point here isn’t “Foss United is useless” - instead, it’s a (IMO fair) question about whether donated money is being responsibly used; and if so, how it’s being used.

[ansh]

@rushabh

1. Grants - There are many other sources now, specially with floss.fund - How are FOSS United grants any different?

I’ll take this up since I look into the grants program and am also part of the FLOSS/fund team -

• FLOSS/fund is focusing on global, critical FOSS infrastructure - projects that are already being used by and have an impact on thousands of people. Newer projects (which is what FU grants have traditionally supported) are not a focus of the fund.
• FLOSS/fund is one company’s way of donating to FOSS and nothing more. The scope of the grants program goes far beyond a one time payout.

@ansh

The grants program should evolve to something much larger than just payouts. We can help grantees not just with money but time, connections, branding, community building, hiring, fundraising, discoverability etc. This has started happening to some extent already.

We are not quiet there yet but are actively working towards these goals. I was part of several such conversations in the last year. We are actively talking to our grantees now instead of running into them at events

You are right that several resources exist but none of them are doing this kind of work, especially in a local context. Venture funding has done a great deal of damage to the FOSS ecosystem and that is enough reason for the grants program to continue to exist.

---

What about outreach and reaching to more industry partners?

Still going on. I myself have brought up IP with at least 10 companies in the last year.

Why are there no industry partners other than Frappe and Zerodha?

Because there is no incentive to funding FOSS. We have had loads of conversations with companies who will happily spend thousands of dollars on events and marketing campaigns but don’t see enough “ROI” in the IP program. Even IndiaFOSS has struggled to raise sponsorships (we ended up with a deficit of INR 10L last year). We are now finally starting to see some growth there because the conference quality now makes up for us not selling out talk slots and participant data, which has now become a standard expectation.

The FOSS Pledge revamp, hiring program (mentioned in the above response) are some new ideas we have come up with to build a better case for Industry Partnerships. We have also considered breaking up the org’s budget to chunks that can be sponsored by one partner. So someone interested in, say hiring freshers can fund FOSS Clubs, Season of Commits etc.

Appealing to the goodwill of certain benevolents is not a good strategy and we need to better develop and showcase the incentives of being an IP.

[Swastik_Baranwal]

I see a lot of things are happening behind the scenes. Most of us don’t even know about this. It’s time for FY 25-26, we start to document such stories.

[Shree_Kumar]

Reading this thread and links, one thing stands out: FOSS United definitely needs to report back to all its sponsors. I feel this shouldn’t require reminders from @rushabh, who has raised similar queries this year and last year too. Sensibull and Commit Company are our sponsors apart from Samagata, Zerodha and Frappe. We really should be giving all of them an yearly update, at the very least (are we?) !

One of the great things about FOSS United is that we have employees who are doing dedicated work, and running programs, which allows volunteers to show up and do something around it. The diffuse benefits of some these can’t be estimated now; in time, hopefully the value of these will be better appreciated!

I’ll readily admit that many of the things that @rahulporuri mentioned wouldn’t come to my mind when I think of FOSS United (it’s a very healthy list!). That’s not because I haven’t heard of them one time or the other, but boils down to “public memory is short”. The utility of an annual report is thus becoming clearer to me. It would serve as a ready reference not just for us, but also our sponsors, and anybody else who is thinking of engaging with us : potential sponsors, partner orgs, volunteers, etc and even government !

I’d go so far as to say that we need a “pretty” annual report, a standard practice among NGOs. We need to do much better than our last Annual Report of 2022 (no offence meant to anybody btw!). A well formatted annual report for 2024 will be a great reference for anybody to understand the scope of our activities and our impact. It would serve to show us in the light that we want to be seen… which is useful in many ways.

Edit: For reference, here’s the blender foundation report for 2023. There next one is due soon.

Some aspects of FOSS United are better left internal to the employees. I’m uneasy about public discussions on staff performance. Such things are best done privately in the foundation. We have to be sensitive to the fact that many of the employees are early stage professionals, and not everyone has the context to process such information. The sensitive nature of such information makes it unsuitable for public dissemination as well.

[rushabh]

@Shree_Kumar thanks for sensible response. My goal is the long term sustainability and to build a thriving FOSS community, and that is why FOSS United needs to be a robust entity doing solid work. Hence my questioning.

I think people should welcome scrutiny (like Vishal did) rather than be defensive because in the long run, the people who keep you honest are the people who help you win.

In terms of staff performance, my question was more from a process point of view - how does the organisation pick pay etc. It was never about disclosing performance of individual staff members (not sure how it went to that). Right now FOSS United may be in a financially unconstrained position due to benevolent donors, but may not be the case forever.

I genuinely wish that FOSS United gets its act together and becomes a strong pillar in the community providing the right platform for people to connect and build.

[rahulporuri]

@safwan_samsudeen

This thread seems to be devolving , which is a pity because the original point is an important one - how is the money getting spent?

@Swastik_Baranwal

I see a lot of things are happening behind the scenes. Most of us don’t even know about this. It’s time for FY 25-26, we start to document such stories.

@Shree_Kumar

A well formatted annual report for 2024 will be a great reference for anybody to understand the scope of our activities and our impact.

The June Governing Board meeting happened on the 27th of June, 2025. At the meeting, I committed to the following. The notes for the meeting have been prepared and will be published on Monday (tomorrow).

• We will publish a Q2 report on July 7 (tomorrow)
• Going forward, we will publish quarterly reports within the first week of the quarter end e.g. Q3 report will be published on Oct 7, Q4 report on Jan 7 and so on
• The quarterly reports will contain financial information i.e. where the money is coming from and where it is getting spent. We will attempt to give as detailed as breakdown as possible
• The annual report for FY 2024-2025 will be published by July 31, 2025. Please note that this will include unaudited financial data for the FY because audited statement from our tax auditors will not be available until later this year
• The audited financial data will be shared publicly within a week of the Foundation receiving it

[rahulporuri]

@rushabh

Also I think each of the staff members need to share what will they “deliver” for the salaries they get

@rushabh

Also maybe each staff member should share their “self review” of their own contributions / performance last year.

@rushabh

It was never about disclosing performance of individual staff members (not sure how it went to that).

If the Foundation staff are expected to

• self-review and report contributions and performance from last year i.e., what they delivered
• share what they will “deliver” for the salaries they get
• and we do all of this publicly every year

how do we not end up “disclosing performance of individual staff members”?

[rushabh]

True, my comments were confusing (I keep forgetting that I am no longer a part of the governance - and don’t see anyone else filling that gap)

But this is what the governance board should be looking into. Right now I see the missing process.

[rahulporuri]

Hey all, we’ve shared Quarterly Report - Q2 2025 - I’ll work on adding financial information from the quarter in the same report