At IndiaFOSS 2024, Prof. Pankaj Jalote, Founding Director of IIIT Delhi, spoke about FOSS and Software Engg education. We (Prof. Pankaj and FOSS United) stayed in touch after the conference. Last month, Prof. Pankaj reached out to us to discuss the possibility of having the Software Engg course (insert missing link. maybe CSE 701) students this semester (Jan-Apr 2025) work on Indian FOSS projects and learn about software engineering in the process.
We reached out to a few projects from the FOSS United and the broader Indian FOSS community regarding this. We also put together two project proposals for the course (see Projects) We are happy to confirm that two teams (3 and 4 students in the teams respectively) will be working on the two FOSS United projects over the coming semester. We and the student teams will use this thread to share updates about our progress, and overall experience over the coming months. We’ve also invited the students to share their updates at the Delhi monthly events, to experience how their work directly impacts the FOSS United community.
@Harsh_Tandiya and I, along with the rest of the Foundation staff, will be working closely with the students to ensure the success of the projects. If successful, we (Prof. Pankaj and FOSS United) hope to take this experience to other academic institutes and work with them to update their Software Engg courses. Software Engg is a mandatory course in most/all CS degrees so enabling a systematic change will be a significant win for the Indian FOSS community (and FOSS United).
P.S. After IndiaFOSS 2024 is when I noticed that Prof. Pankaj Jalote was part of a panel discussion that @anand organized on FOSS in Education - ref Panel Discussion on FOSS & Education
Projects
Project name - Improving the performance of fossunited.org
Between 2020 and 2024, less than 50 in-person events were organized via fossunited.org. In 2024 alone, more than 50 in-person events were organized using the platform (fossunited.org). As the FOSS United Community grows, the performance of the website and the web application become crucial to the long-term growth of the Community. A significant number of performance improvements can be made to the platform - better adherence to modern web standards in the UI, improved architecture of the web application i.e. how the backend and the frontend communicate with one another, and performance profiling & improvements to the backend web application.
Project name - Improving the accessibility of fossunited.org
The FOSS community suffers from a lack of diversity - and diversity doesn’t only apply to gender diversity. While FOSS tools and internet standards empower visually challenged or handicapped computer users, there is a dearth of visually handicapped developers in the FOSS community. The first step in addressing this problem is to ensure that the platform meets the accessibility standards. The team will use publicly available tools to audit the accessibility of the platform and systematically improve the platform to ensure that it is accessible. Additionally, the team will put together references and guidance to ensure that new changes to the platform continue to meet the necessary accessibility standards.