- If you wish to download this as a documents, please use this file from NextCloud - Nextcloud
- If you wish to use a Google account to leave comments on the strategy, please use this google document - FOSS United 2025 Strategy - Google Docs
- If you fundamentally disagree with the strategy (or specific pieces of it), please comment below
- If you want to, you can write to us at rahul@fossunited.org or foundation@fossunited.org for feedback, comments, suggestions, and criticism
TL; DR : The FOSS United Foundation will be focusing on the following during 2025
- Create and share basic FOSS Literacy (e.g. FOSS 101) content
- Create and share FOSS awareness content to promote FOSS creation and use in India
- FOSS Advocacy directed at Industry, Academia, and Government
- Seek and support Co-chairs for FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS from the FOSS United Community. The Foundation will work with the Co-chairs to make all of the fundamental decisions about the events
- Continue working on improving diversity of the community and specifically the events
- Improve fossunited.org to surface information about the volunteering/contributions from members of the Community e.g. organizing events, reviewing proposals, etc
- Identify and support events happening in the Indian FOSS community, financially and otherwise
- Identify and financially support new FOSS from India
- Interact with, work with, and support communities beyond the Indian FOSS community - specifically the Knowledge Commons communities e.g. IndicWiki, Open Street Map, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Science, etc
- Finalize the draft Governance charter, organize elections, and establish a Governance Board for the Community, of the Community, and by the Community.
Where we are
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that every Indian interacts with FOSS on a regular, if not daily, basis. 1658 Crore UPI transactions were done in October 2024 alone, all of which heavily relied on FOSS technologies. India has 101 Crore smartphone users and FOSS powers their phones, irrespective of whether they are Android users or iPhone users. 75 Crore Indians are active on the Internet and most of them likely don’t know that FOSS enables their doomscrolling. Most people recognize UPI, Google, Apple, Internet but most people don’t know what FOSS is.
I’m likely talking to people who already know this but for the same of clarity, FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software. “Free” in FOSS doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay for it. Many of us have likely heard variations of the phrase “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”. “Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom. “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. It might not be straightforward to internalize this, given the abusive relationship that humans have with software that they don’t pay for, but it has an incredible long-term impact on the way we view software.
But why is it important for FOSS to gain recognition among Indians? Let’s set aside the short-term but incredibly valuable benefits that FOSS enables in terms of software that costs less, jobs that have better shelf-life, potential for greater collaboration within and in between industries, etc. Like I mentioned in the beginning, software is intertwined in each and every one of our lives, and the impact that software has on our daily lives will likely increase. And because “Free software” is a matter of liberty, a basic understanding of FOSS enables you to fight for your fundamental rights and demand accountability from the software that impacts you. If I get injured driving on a road filled with potholes, I can sue the Government for compensation. But what do I do if an algorithm denies me the access to food security schemes.
Does a non-technical person even have the capacity to understand FOSS? Everyone in Delhi likely knows what AQI is and that it acts as a proxy of how pollution impacts their health. They likely don’t know exactly how AQI is calculated, what the difference between PM2.5 and PM10 is, or other intricate details. Apple farmers in Himachal Pradesh know that climate change is real and that it impacts their crop produce even if they don’t know the intricate details of the latest climate change model and its’ predictions. Most people in India never have and will likely never will file an RTI application but many know that it exists and maybe know the rights it confers upon them. We seem to grossly underestimate the capacity of the common person but overestimate how much they need to learn about FOSS for it to have an impact.
Things aren’t rosy when we interact with software and other technical communities either.
It both surprises and disappoints us when we continue to have conversations with members of the software community to whom we need to justify the value that FOSS provides to the software ecosystem. FOSS has been popular in India for more than 20 years now but even now, a significant fraction of the software community don’t seem to really understand FOSS. One of the reasons behind this is the lack of FOSS in College/Technical education. Only a few colleges have an active student community who are involved in FOSS projects but for the majority of Computer Science and other Engg. students, FOSS is only introduced to them when they encounter one of the FOSS communities in India.
In addition to this, there is a lot of misinformation in professional circles regarding how secure FOSS is, especially in comparison to closed-source software. The distribution of Software Developer salaries has a long tail and a few software developers with high salaries are also involved in the FOSS community. There is definitely a correlation between involvement in FOSS projects and salary but a number of people mistake this for correlation for causation now-a-days and promote FOSS projects purely as a means to get a high-paying job. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be well paid. But, we have sadly noticed that software developers who get into FOSS purely for the money have a stunted understanding of FOSS e.g. the fundamental difference between free vs freedom.
Finally, the software community has long suffered from a lack of diversity and sadly, this problem is exacerbated within the FOSS community. Diversity here isn’t limited to diversity of gender. India is probably one of the few nations where irrespective of your specialization, if you graduate with an Engineering degree, you are likely to become a Software Developer. But where are the FOSS users from STEM fields? Where are the Humanities folks? It is never explicitly stated but to a majority of the software ecosystem, FOSS feels like something made by Software Developers for Software Developers, which is unequivocally not the case.
FOSS is by everyone, for everyone.
You might feel like this is common knowledge but it is worth stating the obvious when we chart our path forward for the coming year. Without explicitly describing the problems that exist in the ecosystem at the moment, we cannot begin to layout a path for us to walk on. And assuming an implicit understanding and/or agreement on the problems is a recipe for failure when the ecosystem changes in a few years but we still stick to the path that we originally started walking on.
The path forward (2025)
Marketing
FOSS United Marketing effort
A significant fraction of the FOSS United Community are college students and that fraction is increasing every year thanks to the FOSS Clubs effort. There are also a few school students within the FOSS United Community. The Foundation, with help from the Community, will create content that improves basic FOSS Literacy. The content will be very shallow by definition but it will introduce all of the necessary terms and concepts that are needed to form a basic understanding of FOSS. The content is meant for people who have never come across FOSS or who have heard about FOSS but don’t know how to explore and understand the ecosystem further. This means school and college students but also professionals, across all disciplines. Improving FOSS Literacy, by definition, needs to provide a shallow introduction to a broad range of topics. The content will likely take the shape of short text (100 words) + digital media assets (e.g. images, videos) that convey this information in a meaningful way. Please note that this information will be disseminated in English and a number of Indian languages, ensuring that the actual goal of improving FOSS literacy is achieved, preventing language from being the thing that holds back FOSS literacy.
FOSS projects usually don’t have the marketing muscle of the closed-source software industry and FOSS United is uniquely positioned to promote FOSS projects in India. I’m not ashamed to admit that in late 2022, when I first started getting involved in the FOSS United Community, I was under the naive impression that there aren’t a lot of world-class FOSS projects from India. I have been proven wrong numerous times over the past couple of years but the naive perception of a lack of world-class FOSS from India seems to be pervasive. Thanks to FOSS Hack, IndiaFOSS, the numerous meetups that are organized around the country, and the informal conversations that we have within the software/technology community, members of the FOSS United Community get exposed to FOSS projects from India. The FOSS United community, when compared to other FOSS communities in India, also has FOSS users across a diverse range of topics, therefore able to create and disseminate meaningful Case Studies on how FOSS helps solve problems across domains.Working with organizations from the Community, FOSS United will create and disseminate information about how FOSS solves problems. The content will likely take the share of long text (1000s of words) with digital media assets (e.g. images, videos) embedded within to convey the information effectively. Please note that the “FOSS from India” box is taller than the “FOSS Literacy” box in the Marketing effort diagram above but the latter is wider than the former. This denotes that FOSS United will devote low effort (hours) across a broad range of topics for “FOSS Literacy” whereas the “FOSS from India” program requires higher effort (days) across a smaller range of topics.
Last, but the most important, is “FOSS Advocacy”. “FOSS Advocacy” refers to campaigning for an increase in use and creation of FOSS, specifically within the Government, Industry, Academia. Thanks to the Tech Policy scholarship that FOSS United has been awarding for the past two+ years, the FOSS United Community likely has a few more people who are both interested in and able to understand how public policy impacts FOSS use and creation in India. The Foundation, with help from the Community, will embark on an effort to identify and publicise lapses in public policy that don’t incentivize or actively disincentivize the use and creation of FOSS in India. In addition to public policy, the advocacy efforts will also be directed at the Industry and Academia to identify and support initiatives that enable FOSS usage and creation. This effort will likely involve a few campaigns initially (10s) but require an enormous time investment (weeks) to ensure that the campaigns are context-aware and context-specific.
Long-term vision: After five years, FOSS United should not be involved in FOSS Literacy and FOSS promotion/case studies-related marketing effort. FOSS United is an ecosystem enabler which means that not only should we focus on the marketing efforts, we should also focus on ensuring that the ecosystem identifies and appreciates the value that is generated from these efforts. Only then can existing or new members of the broader FOSS ecosystem step up to take charge of such initiatives. By investing and proving the value of such content, we will hopefully catalyze the community to take over in due course of time. This isn’t an impossible dream as there is already a lot of content being created regarding FOSS on various social media platforms e.g. long-form podcasts/YouTube videos and short-form snippets/shorts on Instagram. Institutionalizing similar efforts under FOSS United might enable broader reach for such content and prove that an audience exists that values this content.
A note on staffing: From inception, these efforts need to involve the Community, with the explicit intention to stop playing a leading role in such campaigns eventually. This means that the Foundation will run such efforts on a barebones team of people who are able to work with Volunteers from the Community to get the work done. This will prevent the Foundation from getting to a place 5 years down the line where 10s of people work on such content at the Foundation and the accumulated inertia might potentially prevent the Foundation from winding down such efforts, choosing to rely on the Community instead.
Events
The IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack events are unique in the Indian technology event landscape. Few technology conferences in India, at the moment, compare with IndiaFOSS in terms of the diverse range of sessions, the community spaces that enable interacting with FOSS from India, while being financially accessible to the audience at the scale of the event currently (1000-1500 attendees)! We don’t mean to say that there is no scope for improvement - diversity (gender, background, topics,and more) of participants and speakers at IndiaFOSS continues to be a problem for the Community. IndiaFOSS is still not financially sustainable - the FOSS United Foundation continues to spend tens of Lakhs of Rupees every year to organize the conference because we are unable to find enough sponsors who have the financial strength and who are aligned with our philosophy. Similarly, few Hackathons in India live up to the FOSS principles while seeing the kind of participation that FOSS Hack has.
IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack are, and will remain, the flagship events of the FOSS United Community. I say FOSS United Community instead of the Foundation because we will actively work on reducing the impact that the Foundation staff have on the events while enabling members of the community to take on leadership roles for the events.
At the moment, IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack are “all-hands on deck” efforts for the Foundation. Everyone at the Foundation is involved directly with the events, in somecases focusing solely on the events for months before the events happen. The events would not be successful without the Volunteers but the Foundation staff make many of the fundamental decisions regarding the events e.g. handling the volunteer drive, making the final decision on the schedule, sponsorship, etc. This is sub-optimal in our opinion and starting 2025, we are looking to promote and support active members of the Community to lead the events. Specifically, we will look for Co-leads who are willing to take overall responsibility for the events - IndiaFOSS 2025 and FOSS Hack 2025. The Foundation staff will still be involved with the events and will work with the Co-leads to make fundamental decisions but we believe that this is an important step to enabe the Community to take decisions about the events that are fundamental to the Community.
Please note that IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack have already been incorporating the Community to make critical decisions - the IndiaFOSS review committee and the FOSS Hack judges are entirely comprised of active members of the Community. The new effort simply formalizes the intent of the Foundation.
Why does the FOSS United Foundation want to do this, you ask? There are a few answers to this question - one pertains to the FOSS United Community, another pertains to the broader FOSS Community in India, and the last one regarding Diversity in the Indian Software/FOSS ecosystem.
Maintainership status is one of the few things that a FOSS project can award to a consistent contributor in order to recognize the value that they provide to the project. And as a FOSS community, we believe that finding and supporting Co-leads for the events from within the FOSS United Community is a way to recognize the value they bring to the event and the Community as a whole. But like I mentioned earlier, this is us looking inwards into the Community.
If we look outwards, there are a number of events within the broader Indian FOSS community that are incredibly valuable to their respective communities. And by freeing up the FOSS United Foundation staff, we can spend more time focusing on our mission of supporting FOSS projects and communities across the country! This isn’t new either - since our inception, the Foundation has supported a number of FOSS conferences and communities across India, financially and otherwise. For example, in 2024, we financially supported prominent events like FOSS Meet, UbuCon Asia, DebUtsav, State of the Map Kerala and we are already supporting BarCamp Bangalore and FOSSMeet NITC in Q1 2025. We promoted events like Frappeverse, Rootconf Mini, Grace Hopper Celebration India within the FOSS United Community.
IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack aren’t enough though. India (not just the Indian FOSS community) needs a lot more top-notch FOSS events. Not everyone has the ability to travel to Bengaluru for IndiaFOSS so we need to ensure that FOSS events happen across the country. Not everyone will be free during the specific weekend of the year that IndiaFOSS happens either so we need to support FOSS events throughout the year. FOSS communities need a steady stream of speakers who find and hone their voice, who in turn sustain the communities. FOSS United has the potential to enable the entire ecosystem instead of working to “capture” out a part of the ecosystem.
And as ecosystem enablers, all of these changes enable us to help improve diversity across the Indian FOSS ecosystem. In our understanding, most of the FOSS communities in the country acknowledge the fact that they have a diversity problem and would be more than happy to receive help that can improve the situation. The Foundation has been working on improving diversity within the FOSS United Community. For example, we have been attempting to work with the IndiaFOSS 2024 Diversity Scholars to organize FOSS awareness and action sessions within their communities. Coming from underrepresented communities themselves, who better to bring awareness about FOSS than the scholars. Over the coming year, we intend to support FOSS conferences from across the country address diversity issues by putting them in touch with members of underrepresented groups wherever possible.
The fossunited.org Platform
We have been building and using fossunited.org as the platform to organize the events within the FOSS United Community, including the flagship events. But did we really need to create one? Couldn’t we have used existing platforms like meetup.com? Are we unnecessarily expending effort because of a Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome or because of minor inconvenience relating to integrating multiple platforms/systems? What is the future of the fossunited.org platform and what problem does it solve?
You might have heard of the phrase “Talk is cheap, show me the code”. We could generalize that to the phrase “Actions speak louder than words”. The state of the FOSS United Community is thanks to the actions of countless people over the past five years. But sadly, we were either unable to record many of these actions or the fossunited.org platform at the moment doesn’t have the functionality to show this information publicly. For example, a small distributed group of volunteers have been tirelessly reviewing proposals for FOSS United events over the past years but their contribution to the Community isn’t explicitly documented when you visit their fossunited.org Profile. Giving talks at FOSS United Community events provides tangible value to the Community but prolific speakers don’t show up on fossunited.org because this information isn’t publicly documented on their fossunited.org Profile either. City chapter volunteers are the lifeblood of the Community and their tireless effort organizing meetups month after month is what keeps the Community healthy and active. But when you look at a fossunited.org Profile, you wouldn’t know if the person volunteers at a city chapter.
fossunited.org as an event management platform needs to exist because without it, we will not be able to publicly document the information about the people who make the FOSS United Community tick. And pulling information that already exists in the Platform and displaying it publicly will be a focus over the coming year. FOSS projects show information about people who contribute to the project and information about contributions (number of lines added/deleted, number of commits) becomes one of the indicators of their value to the project. As a FOSS community. It only makes sense for us to do the same.
As the first point of contact for most newcomers to the Community, the design and performance of the Platform are of utmost importance, both of which can be significantly improved at the moment. Looking through the different pages on the Platform makes it obvious that the product went through multiple iterations over time. Over the coming year, there will be a focused effort to consolidate the design of the Platform into a cohesive whole. We will also work on improving the overall performance of the application.
Last, but the most important, is increasing contributions from the Community to the Platform. At the moment, all but a few of the contributions to the Platform are made by full-time staff at the Foundation. Long-term, we would like to get to a point where Foundation staff only enable Community contributions but aren’t solely responsible for them, similar to how Fellows operate in the Django community or how the developer-in-residence operates in the Python community. This will require the Foundation to promote the Platform FOSS project and improve the capacity of the Community to contribute to projects that rely heavily on Frappe.
Financially supporting the Indian FOSS Community
Since inception, the FOSS United Foundation has been finciailly supporting the Indian FOSS community through the grants program. This includes grants for FOSS projects from India and grants/sponsorship for FOSS events happening in India. Like I mentioned earlier in this document, there is world-class FOSS being built in India and the FOSS United Community has a front row seat of the show. And we would be squandering the opportunity if we weren’t able to financially support FOSS projects if necessary. An earlier part of this document talked about promoting FOSS projects, which is itself valuable, but it only goes so far in making the project sustainable. From time to time, we might come across FOSS projects that need financial support to get things off the ground or to keep the project viable while the project figures out long-term sustainability. Parseable and Rethink DNS are excellent examples of world-class projects that we were able to financially support, enabling them to grow.
And financially supporting new and exciting FOSS projects is only feasible if FOSS United has the necessary funds for the grants program. Making IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack into financially sustainable events frees up some of the existing funding for FOSS United, which can be redirected towards the Grants program. The Foundation continues to find new Industry Partners who are interested in taking part in the Grants program or organizations who are interested in co-sponsoring a grant. But this too feels unsustainable in the long-term.
Alternative means of raising or directing funds from the Community need to be considered. Programs like GitHub sponsors, Open Collective enable FOSS project maintainers to accept funds for the FOSS project. But these programs won’t have an impact on the project if members of the project community don’t have the financial strength to donate to the project. On the other hand, people with sufficient financial strength might be interested in supporting projects far and wide but they simply can’t donate to a FOSS project that they don’t know about. Here again, it feels like the FOSS United Community is in a unique position - FOSS United can solve the discovery problem i.e. the projects which need funding and the people who are happy to fund. FOSS United can lend credibility to a FOSS project, thereby addressing any potential concerns a donor might have regarding the project. If the project receives funds from members of the Community, by staying active in the Community they can provide meaningful updates regarding the project e.g. speaking at events, mentoring students from the Community. The FOSS United Foundation doesn’t have to get involved in the finances - if necessary, we can help the FOSS projects setup the necessary GitHub Sponsors/Open Collective pages - reducing long-term burden on the Foundation.
This too isn’t a hypothetical situation as at least one current Industry Partner has asked us to set aside some of their donation to sponsor FOSS project grants and multiple individuals have donated to the Diversity initiative at the IndiaFOSS conference.
Beyond FOSS
FOSS is part of the broader Knowledge Commons movement i.e. information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users. For example, Open Hardware, Open Data, and Open Science movements belong to the broader Knowledge Commons initiative and it is interesting to see how these movements interact with one another. For example, Open Hardware, Open Data, and Open Science initiatives usually create FOSS. It is therefore beneficial to the FOSS community to work with other movements within the broader Knowledge Commons movement to push the ecosystem forward. FOSS United is already working with the broader Knowlege Commons movement. Sponsoring the State of the Map Kerala 2024 event by the Kerala Open Street Map community, providing a grant to the paperd.ink project are a couple of such examples.
This strategic effort is potentially the riskiest but also the most valuable of the various initiatives laid out in the document. Unlike FOSS Communities in India, we don’t know about existing communities that are working towards initiatives like Open Science. There are a number of organizations that are part of the Open Data ecosystem who are also a part of the FOSS United Community (CivicDataLab, Factly, Daksh) but we are yet to work with them on any specific project.
2026 and beyond - Governance
I (Rahul) wrote this document but it is the work of the entire team and loosely speaking, heavily influenced by the broader Community. My involvement in the FOSS United Community since Dec 2022 and my work at the Foundation since May 2024 are the primary influences behind the strategy outlined in this document. But one person (or even a small Foundation team) cannot sufficiently embody the spirit of the Community. As such, 2025 will hopefully be the last year that the Foundation will be setting the strategy for the Community.
Since July 2024, we have been discussing the possibility of electing a Governing Board for the FOSS United Community. Discussions on Governance aren’t new in the FOSS United Community but thanks to better capacity at the Foundation, we are finally able to nudge some of these discussions forward, although at a slow pace. 2025 will hopefully be the year when the FOSS United Community elects a Governing Board - of the Community, by the Community, for the Community. And as elected representatives of the Community, the Governing Board will ultimately be responsible for outlining the 2026 Strategy for FOSS United, among other things.
Wrap up
A meaningful strategy lays out the field, identifies the problems within it, and outlines which problems we should focus upon. There are potentially an uncountable number of problems and challenges faced by the FOSS ecosystem in India. The challenges I outlined in this document are what I believe FOSS United has the capacity to focus on over the coming year. We welcome comments, suggestions, disagreements with what I have laid out in this document. But we want to make one thing clear - none of the challenges that we have outlined above can be addressed solely by the Foundation. If you find any of the above challenges interesting, please consider reaching out to us to volunteer.
but I’m one of the few people who could drive Tech-policy initiatives from the Foundation and I don’t have the bandwidth apart from a little bit of work as part of Advocacy. But there will be a staffing addition next month that should help with capacity at the Foundation so we’ll try to provide more context/direction here late Jan.