The FOSS United volunteers will be conducting a community call on the 9th of December 2023, from 11AM - 12PM.
The agenda is to sit together and get updates from city chapters with regards to monthly meetups, and their plans for the upcoming cityFOSS conferences.
We will also be having a discussion on our future plans for the upcoming editions of IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack and how we can sustain and scale these large scale events going forward.
It is required for at least one volunteer from each city chapter to attend the call,but the call is open to anyone everyone in the community.
We have created a Jitsi video call for the purpose of these monthly calls.
At the moment, I will be joining the call (with hopefully one or more additional volunteers) from the Hyderabad chapter.
We don’t have any updates to share as we decided to cancel the November meetup at the last minute. There were multiple reasons behind cancelling the event but the main reason is that we didn’t get any talk proposals from women speakers. And after two monthly meetups with no women speakers and HydFOSS with only one woman speaker, we decided that the Hyd chapter will not be hosting a monthly meetup if we don’t get proposals from women in the community.
We are attempting to do better outreach with the community to increase the diversity of the meetup overall, especially the diversity of speakers in the meetups.
November meetup went well, good turnout ~80 folks.
December meetup won’t be conducted because of holidays and volunteers availability
CityFOSS conference venue is being scouted.
Hyderabad
Previous meetup was cancelled, upcoming meetup on 16th Nov
Focus on diversity, atleast one proposal must be from under represented communities for the meetup
Mumbai
Linux has good traction in the community for CFPs and meetups
CityFOSS planning is underway, venue hunt ongoing.
Pune
CityFOSS Proposal is underway
Designs for PuneFOSS are being prepared
Venue updates: Looking at corporate and govt venues, we have two colleges as backup venues.
Vishal - The community is encouraged to participate in the forum discussions, it helps us give direction to various decisions that are to be made at FOSS United.
Rahul - For people confused on where should a certain piece of information go
If it is something that the community would want to remember - Post it on the forum
If it is a task that requires instant attention and concerns very few people- telegram
Considering the opinion and suggestions given by the community, we have decided to conduct these events separately, maybe with a short gap (of a month or two) in between to reduce overhead. More discussions on the exact plans are to follow.
Industry Partnerships
Vishal
The draft Industry partnership deck for 2024 is now live on the forum for comments from the community
This is the right time to start reaching out to companies that may be interested. Industry Partnerships provide more value and visibility to the company and it helps us so we don’t have to do multiple rounds for sponsorships of various events.
Rahul
We should set up a call with folks from Tailcall, and reach out to other previous sponsors and partners.
Ansh
A major reason we didn’t get a lot of sponsors at IndiaFOSS was even though companies were interested, their marketing budget for 2023 was exhausted by the time we started outreach.
Pitching partnerships at the start of the fiscal year will hopefully yield better results.
Tech policy
The applications for scholarships for the next batch of the GCPP course by Takshashila foundation are now open.
Vishal will be starting an article series FOSS for bharat,talking about how FOSS can play a huge role in various institutions and programs. Eg. Many GOI initiatives are being built on FOSS to save costs.
As a FOSS community we should start looking into various govt initiatives and suggest them the right pathways and directions using FOSS.
FOSSverse 2023 feedback
With the year coming to an end, we are looking for feedback from the community and your suggestions for the future of FOSS United. Please comment your thoughts in the forum post.
Make a general CFP/RSVP call for people who would like to get regular notifications for every future meetup, instead of them having to check for meetups happening in the city. It will also help us easily reach speakers who may usually miss to submit the CFP for a monthly meetup since the window is very small.