FOSS at the Edge of Experience
Creativity, Immersion, and Tangible Machines
Devroom managers
Agriya Khetarpal (Quansight) and Srihari Thyagarajan (Deepnote)
I, Agriya, am a software engineer invested in writing scientific open source software in the Scientific Python and Jupyter ecosystems, spanning various areas: software packaging, numerical and interactive computing, documentation tooling, web accessibility, and more. I was previously a co-manager of the FOSS in Science devroom at IndiaFOSS last year. The devroom was a success; the planning for it a few months prior also kindled the revival of SciPy India after five long years; an initiative I have continued to co-organise and nurture over the past year.
Srihari is a technical writer at Deepnote and has previously worked with the marimo notebook ecosystem, specialising in developer tooling, developer relations and advocacy, and technical content. He has been actively involved in various open source and knowledge commons communities as a result. Srihari also joined as a co-organiser of SciPy India soon after our revival, and has been leading the way in our foray into an offline-events-first format ever since.
We believe our partnership through this devroom will serve justice to a shared interest in where computation meets human experience as a medium, not merely a tool, and exploring how the world of FOSS fossters fosters this area 
Our motivation to run this devroom
Many a conversation about FOSS focuses on software as infrastructure: something that runs, scales, and gets maintained. This highly experimental devroom is interested in a different question: what happens when FOSS is part of something that you inhabit, play with, or feel, as part of a guided experience?
We believe that this question, hereby kept intentionally vague, opens up a surprisingly wide and underserved territory: one built of games built with (open) game engines that put players inside authored worlds; of creative coding exhibits that make algorithms collaborate with humans in the loop, rather than the end-of-the-pipeline executors (as has been noticed to have been the case with power-hungry generative AI); experiences that interact with audio to sonic and illusory effects; and physical and alternative interfaces outside a traditional computer screen that help dissolve its premise entirely – granting the world of computation access to ethereal spaces with objects and bodies, in 3D.
Communities in such interspersed yet coherent schools of thought exist in India, such as in game development hobbyist circles, design schools, creative coding labs, the maker and hardware-tinkering world, and among those involved in human-computer interfaces and accessibility research. IndiaFOSS is a suitable venue to explore their interactions with FOSS because of the direct connection among the values that drive such philosophies: software that refuses to be a black box, tools that empower users rather than strip them of autonomy, and computation as something that belongs to its users.
This devroom is concerned with “interaction” as the experience itself, where there is no reader, only a participant.
Proof of feasibility
India’s game development scene has been growing steadily for over a decade, and the last couple of years have seen it come into its own. Our annual game developer conference, IndiaGDC is now in its eighteenth edition and drew over thousands of participants in 2025 alone. A reasonable fraction of that crowd consists of hobbyists and indie developers building with open engines, people who are making games not as a profession but out of genuine creative interest. That community exists, it is organised, but it has not had a home at a FOSS-specific event until now.
Creative coding has quiet roots in Indian engineering colleges and design schools, where tools built around the idea of code-as-creative-medium show up from time to time. Students and practitioners coming out of those outlets do not always fit neatly into any existing FOSS track. Similarly, the maker-and-tinkerer world, particularly in Kochi, is active, well-networked, and tends to find its footing at hardware meetups and maker fairs. The interactive audio and explorable systems communities are smaller but present, and again, organise their own gatherings in siloes.
The argument for this devroom is partly about content and partly about community. The sheer breadth of our CFP (below) means we are drawing from several distinct pools of potential speakers simultaneously, so we are confident we can fill a three-hour programme with varied, high-quality submissions. We are creating a room for people who have been showing up to adjacent events and feeling that they are slightly in the wrong place, like a “FOSS misfits” of sorts.
Note: we would rather have a full, energetic, smaller room than a half-filled larger one, and we intend to conduct direct outreach to potential speakers across all areas of the CFP if/once it is circulated.
Number of volunteers
Two volunteers should be sufficient. We would require someone familiar with the projector and microphone setup, and one additional person for other bespoke coordination. Both of us, as managers, are comfortable handling the programme itself and helping out in person.
Proposal reviewers
No more than three reviewers from outside the devroom managers, who would be more suited to review submissions than we would be. However, we may step in with veto power and exercise it to decide the final roster, where our inputs may be needed.
Logistics volunteers for the devroom
Two volunteers. We will seek to find such volunteers, and their names will be confirmed closer to the event.
CFP
We are interested in talks across a medley of six broad areas, though we welcome proposals that span or overlap them, as we consider this a spectrum far wider than these four rubrics.
Games and interactive fiction. Open game engines, libre gaming projects, interactive narrative tools (Twine, Ink, Ren’Py), procedural generation, and the demoscene. We are interested in both the technical craft and the design decisions of such tools, as well as their applications in society, whether for activism or entertainment.
Creative programming and generative systems. p5.js, openFrameworks, GLSL shaders, Blender scripting, algorithmic composition, and beyond. The distinguishing question is authorship, i.e., what does it mean to write a system that then surprises you? We welcome talks about the tools, the process, and the outputs equally.
Physical and alternative interfaces. The screen is one interface among many, and this cluster is about what happens at the boundary between a person and a computational system when that boundary is not a display. We are interested in the interaction design side of physical computing: accessibility-driven interface design where constraints produce novel experiences; wearable and tangible hardware devices that change how people relate to information; voice and gesture interfaces built on open models; projection mappings; and even brain-computer interface experiments at the hobbyist end.
Interactive audio and sound design. VCV Rack, Pure Data, SuperCollider, LMMS, Ardour. Sound is a surprisingly underrepresented point of conversation, possibly because it does not need a screen at all. We are interested in talks about building sonic systems, designing synthesisers, composing with open tools, and the craft decisions involved. We would like to appeal to an electronic music and sound hobbyist community in India that has rarely had a home at FOSS-specific events.
Explorable explanations and interactive simulations. Some ideas are better understood by poking at a system than by reading about it. Agent-based models, interactive physics, cellular automata, and systems in which you change a parameter and watch something unexpected happen are also welcome. Some examples of tools that can be used as simulation canvases include, but are not limited to: NetLogo, Mesa, or pygame. We are interested in discussions about building these kinds of toys and models, the design decisions behind them, and what it means to let someone form their own relationship with a system rather than deliver a conclusion.
Immersive and spatial computing. What happens when the screen stops being the primary surface? OpenXR, open VR and AR toolchains, spatial audio, mixed reality built on open stacks. This is still early territory; thus, we are equally interested in honest accounts of things that did not quite work as in polished success stories.
Talks centred on proprietary tools whose code is not publicly available under an OSI-approved license will not be eligible. We are not looking for product pitches or platform promotion. However, we welcome the inclusion of proprietary tools in the presentation materials to drive dialogues further.
We warmly and explicitly welcome first-time speakers. This devroom is especially interested in hobbyist and experimental work that has not yet found a stage at a conference, let alone a FOSS conference.
Selection criteria
Proposals will be evaluated in roughly the following order of preference:
- Hands-on FOSS projects, such as games, tools, artworks, and systems that the submitter has built or contributed to meaningfully
- Deep dives into specific tools, environments, or design decisions
- Real-world case studies with honest, concrete takeaways, including what did not work with such projects
- Community and contributor-journey talks that offer transferable insights and social commentary
- All other relevant proposals that submitters deem are aligned with the devroom theme
The intentional vagueness of this CFP is itself an invitation. If your work lives somewhere in this space and you are not sure it fits, that uncertainty is a good sign. When in doubt, submit!
Preferred talk durations
We will seek both 10+5-minute lightning talks and 20+5-minute full-length talks to fit the stipulated three hours. We will consider the distribution of lightning and full-length talks depending on the submissions received.
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P.S. We are aware of a proposal for an Open Hardware devroom posted above us, and we think ours and theirs are complementary rather than competing. Their devroom is about building and shipping open hardware artifacts – the PCB, the prototype, and the product. This devroom is about what those artifacts, and software systems more broadly, do to the person on the other side of them, i.e., the experience, the interaction, the dissolution of the screen as just one surface among many, and our premise is “interactivity”. Our essence is that a talk about designing a wearable belongs to us, and a talk about manufacturing one belongs to them.
Thank you!
