This year, ChennaiFOSS is introducing devrooms. The idea is to give the community its own space to run a focused mini-track on a topic they care about. If there’s a subject you think deserves a deeper conversation than a single talk allows, a devroom is the place for it.
We’ll be selecting 2 devroom proposals. Each devroom gets a dedicated slot during the conference on April 19th.
To propose a devroom, reply to this thread with:
Title of the devroom
Details of the manager (name and a short intro)
CFP for the devroom, including the kind of talks you’re looking to feature
Proposals close on April 8th. We may reach out for a quick conversation before confirming.
If you’ve ever wanted to shape what gets discussed at a FOSS conference, this is your chance.
Build2Learn is known for its mini-hackathon-type building sessions where people get together, ideate, form teams, and build something small over a period of 4 hrs.
For this Devroom, we want to bring the same model to FOSS projects.
Maintainers will pitch their project
People who want to contribute will join their teams
At the end of the session, we want people to contribute at least 1-2 PRs
The goal is not just to get the taste of FOSS but to contribute back to it.
Title : Software Patent Regulation in India: A 2026 Retrospective from a FOSS Perspective
Abstract : For Free and Open-Source Software development, the regulation of software patents is not merely an abstract, legal question of patentability. How patents for software are granted present a real and direct constraint on how software can be written, shared, modified, and deployed. In India, Section 3(k) of the Patents Act was intended to safeguard this space by excluding “computer programmes per se” from patentability. However, over time, administrative actions like the various CRI Guidelines released by the Patent Office, and various judicial pronouncements, have steadily reshaped the boundaries of this exclusion by borrowing from foreign jurisprudence, showing a clear deviation from the legislative intent to protect domestic innovators against “a monopoly of multinationals”.
This talk will examine the current state of software patents in India through the lens of FOSS, with particular focus on the 2025 Computer-Related Inventions (CRI) Guidelines. Drawing from SFLC.in’s work on software patents over the past decade, the session will interrogate whether recent developments are effectively expanding the meaning of patentable software through expansive, fragmented legal tests such as “technical effect” and “technical contribution,” and what the impact of these tests are on the community-driven FOSS development ecosystem in the country. The session will also highlight the role of the FOSS Community in successfully campaigning against software patent deregulation in the past.
The talk will conclude by opening the floor to the community and inviting developers and other valued members to share experiences, emerging concerns (including around AI/ML), and strategies for navigating an increasingly ambiguous patent landscape, to establish deeper connections for potential collaborations, and to coordinate on community-led responses to state action.
Code On JVM Chennai is Java network in Chennai where people gather together for sessions and ideate, and learn something in a 5 hours of time every month
For this Devroom, we want to host a Buildathon named Code Brew which is a open source of kind.
Participants can take any existing java open source projects or create their own, make contributions to the open source and publish them!
The best projects and the contributions will be awarded with the reward!
Details of the Manager:
Akash Senthil, Harish Anbalagan, Justin Benito
( Part of the Core NammaFlutter community and the builders of NammaWallet app who have 4+ years of experience in working with Flutter )
Devroom Talks:
We are looking to feature talks about our flutter foss app: nammawallet, the current state of flutter, the current state of cross platform mobile development ( along with the people from KMP-Kotlin Multi Platform, React Native ), why flutter is heavily adopted for Open Source apps and how we can grow the ecosystem more and more aligning with the general overarching ChennaiFOSS Conference.
Goal: To promote and improve FOSS Mobile App Development related talks