Hello all, the first FOSS United in-person meet-up is planned at Takshashila Institute, MG Rd, Bengaluru, on Wed 6th April 4-7 pm. We will have an open agenda, and talk about FOSS and what we can do to build a great FOSS Ecosystem in India!
It was finally great to meet everyone in person. The vibes and energy were amazing.
We started with a round of introductions and then asked people to share their views on what we can do as FOSS United. FOSS United aims to be a platform for building a great FOSS community in India and we would love people use the platform and do great things. Here is a broad list:
Events: We need to do more events. FOSS United meetups will now be monthly! Either at Zerodha office or some other office if other teams want to contribute. IndiaFOSS will be in mid July at IIIT Bengaluru - we expect 500 people to join. People pointed out that we should make FOSS inclusive and invite new people, specially non males.
mon.school: This was one of the major projects under FOSSU this year. The goal here is to grow the platform invite people to teach by creating new, innovative courses and help more people learn technology.
FOSS Grants: FOSS United has already supported 6-7 projects, mainly funded by Zerodha, some by leftover money from Hackathon sponsorships. The opportunity here is to create a fundraising team to raise money from unicorns and then support more projects in India.
Evangelism: Lot of people felt, we need to evangelise FOSS a lot more. Introduce FOSS to non engineers and also spread the world.
Design for FOSS: There was an enthusiastic bunch of designers who were interested in helping FOSS projects with better design. There were invited to help with fossunited.org and mon.school !
FOSS for non-profits (NPOs): Vishal shared his experiences helping NPOs, we discussed we could create a pool of engineers who can go and help NPOs with their tech needs - websites, simple CRM tools (using any platform / frameworks etc)
FOSS Pledge: Kailash introduced that we should invite companies to pledge that they should acknowledge the FOSS they use and encourage their teams to push some of their internal tools as FOSS.
FOSS Policy: FOSS United will work with groups like Takshashila and others to create more awareness for FOSS in government and create rules for government to consume more FOSS (public money = public code). Venky is already working full-time on this.
Internship / Job Platform: Some folks proposed that FOSS United can be used as a platform for internships (similar to GSOC / GitHub Externship) and job listings.
Introducing new engineers to FOSS: Few folks praised the First Commit initiative by Devdutt - and felt we should do more to help new engineers participate in FOSS communities.
Conscious buying: People felt we should promote “conscious buying” of FOSS by choosing free vs non-free tools wherever possible.
Volunteering: There was a discussion on inviting volunteers to take up initiatives in FOSS United and how we can motivate volunteers. We discarded ideas like merch (people do it for the free t-shirt) and instead we should encourage by acknowledging them on websites etc.
There were also various other things discussed. We would love to have volunteers for some of our initiatives like IndiaFOSS, mon.school, grants program etc. If you are interested in any of these, please share your interest on this thread, we would love to invite and empower more and more people using this platform.
Request: Earlier announcements for future meetups please. I’m subscribed to a weekly digest for the forum, and I got a notification email at 5pm on the 6th of April.
