Freedom and Open Source in the Humanities! Starting a FOSS Club within Maharaja Agrasen College, Univerisity of Delhi!
We are starting off as a collective of enthusiasts and nerds who enjoy FOSS and our privacy :P, We have wanted to share the freedoms we have learnt and now enjoyed for a while, so we work to share them with others. For this, we have decided to fall behind the idea of calling ourselves a “Free Software User Group”, we are a bunch of interested users devoted to freedom respecting software and services.
Maharaja Agrasen College, located between East Delhi and Noida. It is a constituent college of the University of Delhi. The college offers courses focusing on the Humanities. Our goal is to inspire our peers on the foundations and philosophy of FOSS. Students studying humanities are keen on various political and philosophical theories, and our goal is to bridge the gap between tech and philosophy to help students imbibe the spirit of FOSS.
We are starting this thread to make our work and efforts more transparently visible and open to everyone’s eye, and doesn’t everyone love a thread to sew in another group’s history into their life :)
Follow us as we aim to bring more of what we see as basic rights of FOSS towards more people, organise and develop an alternative mindset among more people.
If you feel to ask us anything here in the thread works, or you can email us! We are reachable on fsug-mac@lavanche.com, we also have a Fediverse profile over at @fsug_mac@paktodon.asia, join us in our push for software that respects you and that you can respect too!
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Core Team Structuring
The core team structure of FSUG-MAC consists of three key members:- Yashraj, Chirag and Tanya. The three of us were part of the early FOSS United India onboarding meetings, and we’re planning to branch out into different teams after we recruit new members to our club.
We have adopted a flexible structure for our latest members, and we hope to attract new crowds with each informative session that we conduct. The three core members, would primarily be responsible for planning, organizing and executing sessions. We wish to lean on dividing our responsibilities after we conduct a few sessions and understand the strengths of our members.
Since it’s the first of its kind, the slack membership structure that we propose will help new members understand their niche and grasp the amount of time they can devote to the club. We do not wish to hand down responsibilities right off the bat, as it may seem burdening. Members should be free to explore their interests and volunteer based on their availability and resourcefulness.
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Our Progress so far and our Plans for the future!
We were able to gather ourselves and tie us together by the end of December, but we didn’t make much progress until February, as Finals stretched over December and January, we weren’t allowed campus access and the ability for gathering attention waned with the horrors of students facing exams >:(
January was mostly spent licking our wounds from our finals and thinking up and planning for organisation and gathering ourselves onto FOSS platforms and starting synchronising our work.
Feburary is when our college’s usual fest takes place and we all had responsibilities and commitments elsewhere and were unable to book and find any backing to help us organise a stage where we could stand and offer people more about FOSS, so we mostly spent setting up the shared group’s email, setting up our logos, and a social presence on Fediverse.
March offered us a great time as right after the Holi break, our college’s department for intersectional and multi subject courses, which allowed us an opprtunity to organise an event bypassing the college administration, and host it in collaboration with another college entity, with this, we were able to organise our very first session with “What is Freedom? Introduction to FOSS”, it garnered much attention and became a talking point especially around us.
April so far has been us gathering our resources to ge the college authorities to acknowledge our presence and to pull together interested people who have contacted us to bring towards a formalisation of our presence. We will also hopefully be leading our small troupe to the FOSS Delhi Meet up on the 19th.
The next few months are going to be swarmed with finals and practicals followed by the summer break. After which we will be joined by a cadre of new fresh faces for the next semester we would hopefully see more people we can introduce to FOSS and our community.
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“What is Freedom? Introduction to FOSS” (19/03/2025)
Our session where we first went on stage was hosted in collaboration with the B.A. Program (Multidisciplinary Course) department society, and allowed us to nerd out and inform people about FOSS and what freedoms have been left out by proprietary software.
We covered the Free in freedom ,the open in open source, and the “privacy concerns and nightmares” in proprietary software :)
This was mostly an informative session where we talked and talked and talked about our beliefs and our thoughts on Free and Open Source Software, with questions at the end we got to interact with people about their questions regarding it, regarding the government’s role in FOSS, and about its sustainability, we were also able to as the “first FOSS interaction” able to get people to try out cryptpad and use cryptpad’s form feature for showing interests, a first time alternative for many to google forms.
We were allotted the College conference hall and were able to use its projection screen for slides we had prepared.
We had around 30 people who attend our session and stuck to the end.
Myself (Yashraj) and Chirag were able to organise as speakers to allow us to talk about our personal contributions too.
We also had a friend who was able to photograph the session, so we shall be attaching the pictures and the posters to this thread.
After the session were able to hand out Hindi translated flyers that were handed to me by Ravi a few years ago to help promote Libreoffice and libre software.
Poster of the event
Snaps
Yash lent me his Debconf T-Shirt 
Presentation Slides
FOSS_Session.pdf (2.2 MB)
Apologies as we’re posting this after significant delay, thanks for reading this through!
We’ll be updating this thread and we’ll bring you more stories!
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Great stuff @lazybones and @disaster2life ! It’s heartening to see students take the initiative, especially from students of the Humanities! Highlighting that translation, documentation, community management, and outreach are FOSS contributions is incredibly important!
We hope you’re able to attend the meetup.
After the summer, let’s chat once your college/semester schedule is finalized. We would love to help plan and organize FOSS sessions next semester.
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