@sujatha_mohan, @agriyakhetarpal and I ran the Documentation & Technical Writing devroom at IndiaFOSS 2026, the first one for Write the Docs India since the chapter restarted (and the room was packed!).
We’ve written up how it went, with photos from the day:
Thanks to the IndiaFOSS team, especially @Shree_Kumar, @sumit_semwal and @rahulporuri, for all the help!
That page looks so nice ! Makes me wish again that you should have had direct control over your devroom page, all its content. I’m referring to this page of course Devrooms 2026 . Really liked those abstracts below the talks.
@srihari_thyagarajan FOSDEM does not provide devroom pages IIRC, but we do. Is this an optional model that we should think of for IndiaFOSS ? Optional as in - if a community running a devroom already has an independent online presence, then we can redirect to that page, if the devroom managers say so. What say?
Thank you!!
you should have had direct control…
Yup, something to really think about for next year given most of our conversations on our thread were related to minor changes in schedule/agenda, etc. which could’ve been avoided.
Thinking of it as an optional model does sound nice! From an attendee/reader perspective (who lands on the devrooms page), seeing various devrooms displayed with buttons/links pointing to respective places: one under FOSSUnited itself, (i.e., IndiaFOSS 2026 | FOSS United/devrooms/) for uniformity and two, to respective websites (like ours) would give users choices to visit either as they prefer.
I’d like this 
Cool. I see your point here, but isn’t that somewhat academic ? In the sense, it’s hard enough to get people to follow one link ! And this year, we did stuff like Communi-Con, where we sent folks to vote on sites belonging to another community directly from email.
The right description for devrooms should be tweaked to “Parallel tracks organized by independent communities”. And then devrooms get the option to add whatever postfix they want. They are tracks. Could call it a “Meeting”, “Miniconf”, “Megameet” or whatever 
If “somebody” feels the need for an “external link” sort of labelling, then we could adopt “Documentation & Technical Writing Track [community site]”. But even that still like a stretch. With the right description for a track, would it matter where the website is. For a few yes, but for most probably not ?
There are also positives for “festival” labelling if every community has their own website. That’s what our festivals are right
True; having too many CTA links ends up being counter productive.
Communi-Con voting and overall structure was easy to follow!!
I think we could have have fun brainstorm session on the right wording/phrasing for devrooms next year; something like miniconf is literal and conveys the point aptly.
Having a link in the title itself is definitely a stretch; I suppose it wouldn’t really matter where the contents for the devroom page are hosted as long as the content itself leaves no room for ambiguity. Anyway, even if you were to link to a custom webpage (non-FOSSUnited), the CTA links on the webpage would have to redirect/link back to the FOSSUnited CFP page…
Yes we can discuss later. But this redirect shouldn’t be necessary. If the idea is that the devroom community has an independent presence, and they can run their own CFP process - then this should not be required. Some data exchange would be required (e.g. schedule), etc - but that’s a later discussion of mechanisms.
Ahh, gotcha. This approach would quite literally give complete control of things to the respective devroom managers…
Would love to know what other devrooms organizers think of this; I’ll share this thread on the TG channel!
FOSDEM works exactly like this I guess. Thus, it’s a proven model for existing communities. This means now that both models are proven - hosted on conference website, or on community website.
FOSDEM is a massive conference of course. While I am not comparing to FOSDEM, I feel our model tries to pack in more infrastructure - which is possible due to us creating a scalable model tailored to local conditions. This year, we did photo coverage, with student volunteers and rented cameras. Not bad results for 1 iteration. Next year … ?