Call for Devrooms for IndiaFOSS 2025

IndiaFOSS Conference
21

Data for Good - Digital Solutions for Impact

Devroom Managers

Primary Manager: Abheejit Khandagale

As Digital Solutions Director at Catalyst Now, I lead our Digital Collaborative initiative connecting over 12 organizations building technology for social impact across 140+ countries. With experience organizing digital solution workshops in Bogotá and facilitating the collaborative development of impact measurement tools, I bring practical expertise in building tech for good. My motivation stems from seeing how open-source collaboration can dramatically accelerate solutions for sustainable development while ensuring they remain accessible to communities across the Global South.

Secondary Manager: Avani Parekh

I serve as Collaborations Facilitator at Catalyst Now, with a background in big tech and extensive experience bringing together diverse stakeholders for technology initiatives. I’ve organized digital collaborative sessions for impact ecosystems in multiple countries and facilitated the Compliance Conundrum initiative to streamline technology requirements for funding. I’m motivated to create spaces where developers can connect directly with real-world social impact needs and build solutions that bridge technological innovation with community priorities.

Proof of Feasibility
Our devroom directly connects to Catalyst Now’s Digital Collaborative network of 3,500+ organizations working on digital solutions for social impact. From this network alone, we can draw speakers from organizations like:

  • Rural Senses (AI for measuring social and environmental impact)
  • Play Verto (gamified surveys for impact)
  • Impact Intel (data analytics for impact ecosystems)
  • Poverty Stoplight (digital solutions for poverty measurement)
  • Green Light Movement (impact tracking platforms)

We have real implementation examples from impact ecosystems in Colombia, India, South Africa and beyond, with organizations already collaborating on interoperable digital solutions. The Better Deal for Data initiative within our network focuses specifically on ethical data sharing for social good, providing rich content for FOSS developers interested in this space.

Volunteers Requested
Proposal Reviewers (2): We will have two proposal reviewers from our network with expertise in both technical implementation and social impact applications.

Logistics Volunteers (2): We request two volunteers to assist with logistics during the devroom sessions.

Call for Proposals: Data for Good - Digital Solutions for Impact
Scope
This devroom focuses on open-source technologies that enable social impact organizations to collect, analyze, share, and utilize data for social and environmental good. We welcome talks that address:

  1. Open Impact Measurement Tools: FOSS platforms, APIs, and visualization tools that help measure social and environmental impact across sectors including health, education, climate, and economic inclusion.
  2. Data Commons for Social Good: Infrastructure and governance models that facilitate ethical data sharing across organizations working on similar challenges.
  3. Interoperability Solutions: Technical approaches to breaking down data silos in the social sector, including data standards, API frameworks, and integration tools.
  4. Community-Driven Tech: Methods for developing technology with rather than for communities, ensuring solutions meet local needs and incorporate indigenous knowledge.
  5. AI & Machine Learning for Social Impact: Open-source AI applications that leverage shared datasets to drive insights and action in sustainability and development.
  6. Accessibility & Inclusion: Technical approaches to ensuring digital solutions work for all, including in low-connectivity environments and for users with varying digital literacy.

We particularly welcome talks that:

  • Demonstrate working implementations with real impact data
  • Share lessons learned from field implementations in challenging environments
  • Address ethical considerations in data collection and use
  • Bridge technical innovation with practical social impact applications

Submissions from developers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, community organizers, and impact professionals are all welcome. We strongly encourage contributions that represent diverse perspectives, particularly from the Global South.

1 Like
22

Hi everyone, thank you for the submissions!

The Call for Devrooms is now officially closed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll evaluate the proposals and set up calls with shortlisted organisers to discuss these in more detail. We aim to announce the selected Devrooms for IndiaFOSS 2025 by end of this month.

2 Likes
23

Hey all, since the scope was very similar, we have talked and are merging the CFPs for the following devrooms:

Should we post the updated/merged proposal and CFP here for convenience?

24

@Ayan_Mahapatra @Lakshmiteja yes please update and post here. Once that is done, please edit the original ones indicating the merge.

1 Like
25

Title: FOSS Licensing and Security Compliance

Managers:

@Ayan_Mahapatra and @Lakshmiteja

Volunteers:

Intro:

The scale of open source software reused in products is ever increasing.
And US, EU, Indian, and other governments introduced cybersecurity compliance
regulations for anyone distributing software. So, what does this mean for developers?

Any software maintainer, producer, developer, and contributor needs to be aware of their
software dependencies and any associated risk, and how to efficiently manage software components.
This is most often – and now regulated – with SBOMs. FOSS compliance – both licensing and security
– is simplified by generating SBOMs and checkmarks in the compliance process.

Our goal is for open source developers, users, and contributors to exchange requirements, plans,
and collaboration opportunities around FOSS tools for software license and provenance detection,
vulnerability management, regulatory compliance like SEBI regulations/CERT guidelines,
code scanning, container and package dependency analysis, SBOM creation and consumption,
and license or vulnerability databases - basically, all the tools you need to figure out
which FOSS code you use, where it is from, what is its license, how to comply with the
license, and whether it contains vulnerable code.

Proof of Feasibility:

We’ve had multiple well received talks/sessions on similar topics at individual FOSSUnited
chapters and IndiaFOSS conferences, to name a few:

At IndiaFOSS 2024, there was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on OSPOs and Organisations
which we attended and there were lively and well attended discussions there on all things
OSPOs, SBOMs and Security/License compliance. We had a participation of around ~30 people
and 1 hour wasn’t enough for all the interesting discussions we had there. We had to
relocate to a different area in the convention center to continue our discussions since
there were other sessions after that.

Some of the volunteers have also been a part of the team that organised the full-day FOSDEM fringe event:
FOSS license and security compliance tools workshop by AboutCode, and we have attended/there were similar devrooms
being organised every year at FOSDEM:

We have also community partners at IndiaFOSS 2024, hosted two booths for community
organisations that we are a part of:

  • OpenChain India WG
  • AboutCode

Source Code Control also managed a booth at OSI 2024.

Number of volunteers requested for the devroom:

Proposal reviewers: 2

CFP:

Scope of talks:

  • FOSS tooling and open data projects on licensing, vulnerabilities, community health metrics, compliance, software supply chain management
  • Demonstrations of FOSS Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools, OSS security solutions, and Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platforms
  • FOSS compliance tooling users and common issues
  • SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials): tools that produce or consume SBOMs
  • Use of different types of SBOMs (Source, Build, Deployed, Runtime, etc.) in the software supply chain
  • Indian policy landscape on SBOMs/Compliance
  • Case studies and lessons from OSPOs (Open Source Program Offices)
  • Case studies and lessons from Security/Compliance teams
  • Software supply chain problems and security issues
  • Best practices and open standards in software supply chain
  • Developer advocacy and open source communities in compliance
  • Vulnerability advisories, open data, reporting and reachability
  • Open source licensing, copyrights, patents
  • Collaborative strategies to enhance OSS sustainability and security
  • Best practices in AI deployment that align with FOSS compliance

Talks from open source communities, on community-driven innovation and real-world applications will be preferred.

We welcome both technical talks and practical demos, with preferred durations of:

  • 5 min (Lightning Talks)
  • 20+5 min (Standard Sessions)
  • 40 min (Panel Discussions)

This is after merging the CFPs for the following devrooms proposed above:

26

This is merged with another proposal: Navigating FOSS Compliance: Governance, Security, and Global Impact proposed by @Lakshmiteja and now is here: FOSS Licensing and Security Compliance

27

Are the devrooms finalized yet?

28

Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we’ve received an enthusiastic response) not yet. As @ansh indicated earlier in the thread, this will be done by the end of this month. My original post wasn’t updated with the date. Sorry if that kept you waiting.

3 Likes
30

The devroom proposals have been discussed and we have made our choices. Frankly, it wasn’t an easy choice!

We had planned on having four devrooms. However, the array of proposals we received made our task quite difficult. So much so that we couldn’t get ourselves to select just four. We ended up selecting six! Thanks again to every one of the devroom proposers - it was quite some work making those proposals and we are thankful for all the efforts put in. Also we thank @Nemo again for proposing inclusion of devrooms for IndiaFOSS 2025. We are pretty sure this is a great way to get more of the community involved.

Here are the selected devrooms for IndiaFOSS 2025, in alphabetical order, tagged with the primary proposer for notification:

  1. AOSP @amit_pundir
  2. Compilers, Programming Languages and Systems @Ashutosh_Pandey
  3. FOSS in Science @rahulporuri
  4. Geopolitics and Policy in FOSS @Anwesha_Sen1
  5. Open Data @Nemo
  6. Open Hardware @Balu_B

Hearty congratulations to all the selected proposers! Please do pass on the good news to your fellow managers and teams. We (conference committee and volunteers) look forward to discussing these with you guys, and we’ll be sending meeting invites for the same later this week. Do note that the last date for submitting proposals to the conference is now advanced to June 7th. That gives us over a month to get proposals in. The announcement of the selected devrooms will be made soon, and the proposal submission form would start accepting proposals for the same as well.

The proposals that didn’t make it have uncovered many possibilities in terms of what could be done at the conference. So we have a couple of suggestions in this regard…

  1. BoF (Birds of a Feather) proposals are now open. We’ll be accepting them till June 7th. Please consider proposing a BoF if you feel that can fit your topic.
  2. Talk proposals and workshop proposals are also open. Some of the devroom planned content could be proposed into these funnels.
7 Likes
31

@amit_pundir @Ashutosh_Pandey @rahulporuri @Anwesha_Sen1 @Nemo @Balu_B just a reminder that CFPs for IndiaFOSS are closing on June 7th.

We will soon reach out to you for scheduling a call to discuss operations, marketing etc. for the devrooms but for now please proceed with the following on priority -

  • Finding co-managers,volunteers if you don’t already
  • Promoting the CFP within your network and sending it to potential speakers. A social media post announcing the selected devrooms will go out soon from our end so hopefully that will also help.
  • Please start working on the content for your devroom. We will be creating webpages for each devroom so a one pager description of the track would be helpful.

If you need any help, please reach out to me or just email indiafoss[at]fossunited[dot]org. Looking forward to working with you folks!

3 Likes