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