FOSS Clubs - 2024 Roadmap

Students Program FOSS Clubs
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After three months of experience working with the 13 Club Leads part of the FOSS Clubs program, I and @wisharya had a discussion on our future steps and a roadmap for this initiative.

FOSS Club Plans

Categorizing clubs

There is a huge difference in the existing clubs based on the resources provided by their colleges, the lead’s year of study, and their exposure to the FOSS ecosystem. It is very important to categorise them accordingly so that personalized recommendations and activities can be planned for them.

Mentorship

FOSS United will open an application for people from the community to apply to mentor club members/leads on various grounds. If you have a good amount of experience working with a particulat tech stack or managing communities, you can apply to mentor the clubs.

  • Day-to-day activities mentorship

  • Event/Activities mentorship

  • Technical mentorship (sessions,workshops,projects)

Mandatory Activities

We believe there is a certain set of events that every lead should organise in their tenure, they naturally have the liberty and support from our end to conduct more such FOSS events

  • Workshops

  • Linux Installation Party (LIP)

  • Expert Talk: ex: Developers sharing their journey, Niche topics like Postgres, React

  • Mini FOSS Hack* (internal hackathon)

Team

There should be enough team members who can lead the following workgroups:

  • Outreach: Social Media (SM) posting, engagement, getting reposting from different companies/people and reaching out to colleges.

  • Technical: Event portal, projects

  • Design: Posters, Social Media designs, UI-UX for club websites.

  • Logistics: Venue, Printing, Food, Videography/Photography and Low Waste for events.

Budget

  • Rs. 1,000 max for each workshops, LIP and expert talks

  • Rs. 10,000 max for Mini FOSS Hack

  • Rs. 25,000 max for collaborative events like CityFOSS conference, CityFOSS Hack

Swags

  • We can provide t-shirts and stickers for the major events (ex- FOSS Overflow by FOSS Club IIT Bhilia & KWOC by KOSS at IIT KGP)

  • 6 t-shirts and stickers for the core team members after three month of starting the club.

Current Status

  • Most colleges have exams or vacations in the next 2 months,we should try hosting online activities for the clubs.

  • Core teams have been onboarded, along with getting necessary permissions from authorities

  • All club activities are being documented by leads on the forum - Students Program - FOSS United

A community call is scheduled for the club leads on December 3,Sunday.

Note: Providing Liberty to Clubs - @wisharya and I feel that apart from having the club page on the platform, the clubs should have the liberty to create their projects including a seperate FOSS clubs websites and list them on the platform.

This cohort of FOSS Clubs is supposed to end by July 2024, which is when applications for new leads will open. The applications for the next batch were to open in January 2024, but we feel it is too soon for us to onboard new leads as we are currently learning from our experiences with the current cohort of club leads.

Request for Comments:

Projects - We would like to take the community’s suggestions on how can our student network coming in through the FOSS Clubs program help contribute to existing FOSS Projects. There is a huge requirement for contributors in the FOSS ecosystem, and these students are willing to start contributing but may often get overwhelmed with huge codebases. We want to create an environment where project maintainers can introduce students to these projects and help them start contributing.

This could also potentially happen through the Season Of Commits Program.

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Particularly loved the whole plan and thrilled to see it’s onward action. :smiling_face:

I would like to add that the regular catchup calls for FOSS Club Leads that we had a brief discussion about, and that are being planned to put into motion can be taken as a space to have interesting activities.

  • An expert speaker session
  • A code and build-together activity. etc.,
  • Experience sharing

would be little steps that would add up to some really good results.
The leads taking ownership of some would be another positive add-on.

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Would like share an idea regarding this.
We can have something similar to how a TedEx Talks is. Where one capable contributor/speaker comes and shares his/her experiences or even talk about some FOSS Project they’ve been putting efforts into. Can be a small 2-3 hour talk event depending on how long the speaker can enthusiastically share his story.

The name can be FOSS Talks (of course suggestions are openly accepted).

Regarding the Projects:
Being a student, I always feel that platforms like Leetcode, Hackerrank, GFG and other fancy course websites are being gained more attention from the students. Students can try building things around some really old, nice and esoteric technologies which has been now been deprecated unfortaunely. For ex: the other day we were talking about Gopher Protocol. This might need a lot of internet digging.

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Note: FOSS Clubs looks like it was created to provide information for the potential leads of the first cohort but now that there’s a cohort, it should probably be updated to include information about the cohort itself

One key thing missing here is the geography of the FOSS club itself - is the club in a city with an active FOSS United meetup chapter? If we’re talking about “Expert Talk”, being in a city with an active FOSS United chapter will help tremendously when finding such “Experts”

If the club is in a city with an active chapter, they should seriously consider someone from the city chapter as their mentor. Having an in-person mentor is better than a virtual mentor, in my humble opinion.

While I am very pro the idea of “Expert Talks”, the FOSS clubs/FOSS United needs to be very deliberate when executing on the idea. There are a lot of “Experts” who are popular but don’t really come with the necessary FOSS credentials and having such “Experts” at the FOSS Club would be an indirect endorsement by FOSS United. Asking the FOSS Clubs to go through FOSS United for every “Expert” feels like too much of a burden so we might want to find a middle ground.

Personal note - In most colleges, the number of students who don’t study computer science is (far) greater than the number of students who study computer science. As someone with a background in Physics, I strongly believe in helping people learn how to “apply computing” instead of making them “learn computer science”. It might feel like a small difference but the reality is that helping an electrical engineer or a civil engineer to “apply computing” to their domain will have far broader outcomes than simply nudging them to “learn computer science”. There are a significant number of FOSS projects in each engineering domain so it should be a “Mandatory Activity” to hold multidisciplinary sessions e.g. workshops on FOSS projects in engineering domains, Expert Talks by engineering professionals who use/apply/develop FOSS software, etc. One such mandatory activity could simply be students from different disciplines simply going over their course content to identify and highlight the FOSS projects that are already used in the course material.

Personal opinion - I strongly believe that we should be placing an emphasis on the problems that people solve and why those problems need to be solved instead of the tools that are used to solve the problems. Postgres, React, etc are simply tools that can be used to solve a large number of problems. It is important to understand and appreciate them. Paraphrasing Emmert Wolf, “A software engineer is only as good as his understanding of his tools” but only when you fully understand a problem is when you know what tools to consider using in the first place.

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Yes, what you’re saying is actually right. But in the initial days (somewhere around 22 or 25th september ) I remember we were discussing about the same.
We have a problem in here that is more Tier-II/III cities do not get much attention from our side. So, to increase more awareness we plan to also have FOSS Clubs in those “not so rich in FOSS Culture” cities. Won’t make much sense in fostering and empowering FOSS in a city which already has a decent/good tech/FOSS community somewhere around.

So, it is in a way more beneficial to have a 50-50% division for the FOSS Club regions.

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Fair enough. I would still say that it is useful to have a “Hub and spoke” model where there is a central Tier-I city that could act as a hub for a number of smaller Tier-II/III towns nearby.

Note that this shouldn’t be a requirement. We should definitely encourage chapters in colleges that are nowhere near a city with an active chapter.

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Very true, even in one of the recent threads regarding the FOSS Overflow. There are only experts / leads from those education oriented programs like LFX, MLH or similar.

There have been a lot of folks in our community itself who really are that talented and have the capacity of giving a knowledgeable talk.

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Note: FOSS Clubs looks like it was created to provide information for the potential leads of the first cohort but now that there’s a cohort, it should probably be updated to include information about the cohort itself

Yes, the new platform will have a clubs page showcasing all our active clubs.

One key thing missing here is the geography of the FOSS club itself - is the club in a city with an active FOSS United meetup chapter?

The clubs were not made keeping the geography in mind but rather the merit of the leads’ applications.
Vishal has shared the current cities in which FOSS clubs are based here

If we’re talking about “Expert Talk”, being in a city with an active FOSS United chapter will help tremendously when finding such “Experts”

Definitely, having a FOSS Club in cities where city chapters are already active has great benefits. Similarly, Cities with FOSS Clubs facilitate the respective City Chapter to host meetups there as well.

If the club is in a city with an active chapter, they should seriously consider someone from the city chapter as their mentor. Having an in-person mentor is better than a virtual mentor, in my humble opinion

Agreed.

Personal opinion - I strongly believe that we should be placing an emphasis on the problems that people solve and why those problems need to be solved instead of the tools that are used to solve the problems. Postgres, React, etc are simply tools that can be used to solve a large number of problems. It is important to understand and appreciate them. Paraphrasing Emmert Wolf, “A software engineer is only as good as his understanding of his tools” but only when you fully understand a problem is when you know what tools to consider using in the first place.

The broader idea of FOSS clubs is definitely evangelism to FOSS in general, irrespective of students’ backgrounds. However, this willl take some time. All club leads so far have a background and belong to CS departments,which is where they established the clubs. Even then, we faced quiet a few problems

For example, one of the leads was asked to keep the club restricted to only AI-ML because they belong to that particular department. Even my department has asked me to keep the club participation restricted to our department only ( There are 3-4 departments in just CS)

Convincing them to let students from just another CS department to be a part of this program seems like a tough road right now, I can only imagine how difficult it is going to be for students from say a science or arts field to be involved here. We definitely have these issues in mind and are trying to think how to convince and educate the authorities on our philosophy.

I will try to document my experience with dealing on this issue with my college as well.

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Can I ask for additional information as to why this is the case? Is this because the respective departments are allocating space for clubs to host the events?

Personally, this is extremely short-sighted behavior by the relevant authorities and FOSS United should strongly push back on this.

I (and i’m sure other community members) would be glad to do anything we can that can help convince the authorities in your respective colleges.

We could start by simply sending an official email from FOSS United to the relevant authorities requesting them to remove the unnecessary restrictions. It could be “signed” by the community leaders in FOSS United.

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From my brief experience as a club lead, there seems like each of these departments have seperate budgets and responsibilities for student club activities. The HOD then has to report the activity of their respective departments to higher authorities, for example:

How many active clubs does the department have
How many students from the department are part of these clubs, how many are participating in events.

From their perspective, I suppose the easiest solution is to just enforce the clubs in their department to prioritize taking in people (in the team, and for events in general) from the same dept.

These were some of the guidelines we were told to follow;

The core team should completely be from our department.
70% of the participants in events are to be from the same events.

We could start by simply sending an official email from FOSS United to the relevant authorities requesting them to remove the unnecessary restrictions. It could be “signed” by the community leaders in FOSS United.

Said guidelines have only been told to me in a meeting verbally, and I’m waiting if we are actually sent any formal notifications to follow them.

But if we find other clubs are facing such issues as well we should definitely communicate our stance to the authorities. The program is in a very nascent stage right now and the focus so far has been to get required permissions from authorities and get things up and running.

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TL;DR - Excluding a majority of a college community from accessing a FOSS Club event feels like it’s against the FOSS United values (and FOSS values in general).

I really don’t want to get you into trouble but what happens if these aren’t followed?

I’m also relatively new to FOSS United and I am beginning to have awkward conversations with potential Industry Partners whose values don’t fully align with the values that FOSS United has. It’s not easy to push back against such demands. But, at the moment, it looks like it’s important to find partners that fully believe in the values we hold and support us instead of pushing us to make (hopefully temporary) exceptions.

In my humble opinion, it is very difficult to set the right expectations from Day 1 but doing so provides a lot of meaningful value over time. While it is important to get things up and running, the clubs/club leads should seriously consider the message that they are implicitly sending to the rest of the college under such circumstances.

I hope this isn’t a widespread issue among the current cohort of FOSS Clubs. If it is, it’s a serious cause for concern.

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Just a summary of what I’ve noticed from whatever activity I have seen through chats, discussions, threads or meetings at times is that these club leads are still going to face a whole bunch of anecdotes, reality checks and problems while evangelizing someone to consume or develop FOSS.

Have seen a couple of club leads facing these issues. One of which was the A.I Department issue and a couple more. But gradually, they don’t seem to give up on this at all.

Imagining myself from a club leads perspective

  • First and foremost - showing some kind of output to the faculty. this worked out actually well for me. I organized SolapurFOSS and when some of my teachers who attended the Conf told my HOD about it. My HOD himself reached out to me asking if we could do something in my college.
  • I would’ve focused more on passing the vision and my learnings.
  • Constantly sharing and discussing what are the benefits out of FOSS.
  • and most of all - making them understand that FOSS is very simple as many people think of it as a very hard thing to take up on.
  • Homeworks: at the end of the day, the members of the club are the ones who choose whether they want to keep learning about / around FOSS or just switch back to their proprietary comforts in life.
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On the bright side, colleges are very interested in what we’re doing and the kind of support, mentorship and the access to an amazing network FOSS Clubs have through FOSS United.

My college has shown interest in sponsoring our future events as well (which is rare), so I’m very hopeful that we can convince and make the authorities understand our vision. The main goal of both sides is the benefit of students :slight_smile:

In my humble opinion, it is very difficult to set the right expectations from Day 1 but doing so provides a lot of meaningful value over time. While it is important to get things up and running, the clubs/club leads should seriously consider the message that they are implicitly sending to the rest of the college under such circumstances.
I hope this isn’t a widespread issue among the current cohort of FOSS Clubs. If it is, it’s a serious cause for concern.

We will make it a point to get more feedback on this from the leads.

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Minutes of the Meeting FOSS Clubs Community Call

Date: 2.12.23

Attendees:

Agenda:

  1. Introduction to Community Calls
  2. Updates from Club Leads
  3. Addressing Challenges and Solutions
  4. Next Steps and Future Events

1. Introduction to Community Calls: Community calls are recurring monthly meetings where all FOSS club leads gather to share updates, discuss challenges, and connect with the FOSS United team. The purpose is to foster collaboration and provide a platform for exchanging ideas.

Shared Documents:

2. Updates from Club Leads:

Advaith: MITS FOSS Club

  • The club activities were started in November.
  • Event 1: “Intro to Linux” had good attendance.
  • Hands on sessions, and giving the audience tasks to perform during the events is beneficial
  • Have posted all updates on the forum.
  • Shared positive experiences from a small scale Linux installation fest experiment at his home.
  • Queries Discussed: how to choose which events to collaborate on, FOSS events philosophy, how to evangelise FOSS in a compelling way, thoughts on potential event sponsors that may want to promote proprietary products
  • People are not familiar with open source, moving to FOSS is difficult,we should find some cool tools to showcase

Tushar: FOSS Club IIT Bhilai

  • Covered various events, including intro to open source. How to contribute to Open Source, How to earn through open source etc.
  • Events on Git/GitLab, bash scripting.
  • Linux installation party was conducted - Chose to use ubuntu since they wanted the students to use the most basic and popular distribution.
  • Planning FOSS overflow,a winter of code program in collaboration with another open source club, supported by FOSS United.
  • Planning future projects like a CTF.
    Queries: Transition of club leads for the next batch - Leads should work with juniors and groom them into potential leads

Vishal:

  • Suggested scheduling regular calls to improve event structures.

Pranav: FOSS Club STIST

  • Started the club activities in September.
  • Successful events in October and November.
  • First event in october - intro talk on open source, went well
  • They noticed a gap in participation among first years and senior years
  • Facing challenges due to time constraints and exams, lack of time.
  • Advocated for a project management tool for FOSS clubs. (https://taiga.io/)

Subroto: FOSS Club IIIT kalyani

  • Provided updates on the official establishment of the club.
  • Shared the core team formation process and selection criteria.
  • Mentioned plans for an online event and a Linux installation fest.
  • Cybersecurity event tentatively planned for Jan-Feb.

CTA for Ansh and Vishal - Have a call with this core team

3. More discussion on events:

  • Emphasis on collaboration, choosing the right collaboration.
  • Strategies for dealing with sponsors of proprietary products.
  • Ways to make FOSS appealing to those less familiar.

4. Addressing Challenges and Solutions:

  • Acknowledged time constraints and exam challenges.
  • Proposed mentorship between leads and juniors, and also FOSS United’s plans for introducing mentors for each club.

5. Future plans

  • Follow the roadmap shared.
  • FOSS Clubs will play a key role in future cityFOSS conferences and FOSS hack editions.
  • Ansh will conduct one on one calls with all leads this month.
  • Vishal - The team will try to visit the campuses and talk to the clubs’ core teams.
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Soham: FOSS Club SIT

Team Formation:
Core team established with 7 committed members from the 1st year.
Roles:

  • Technical (2 members dedicated || 2 partial)
  • Media (2 members dedicated || 1 partial)
  • Events (2 members dedicated)
  • Documentation (1 member dedicated || 1 partial)
  • Financial (2 members partial)

Outreach progress:
Have performed unofficial outreach in form of informal Linux installations, 10-15 people are interested in the concept of FOSS. See outreach progress here. Introduction of a points system to motivate core team to keep advocating for open source.

FOSS Club SIT curriculum:
First draft of curriculum almost ready, will reach out to other technical college clubs in Pune with the same after its finalised with FOSS United and SIT. (PuneFOSS outreach)

Media Team Updates:
Media team trained in GIMP and other design software with the help of Rupankar Das
Successful launch of social media presence: Twitter Instagram Linkedin

Media Strategy:
Targetting a two-posts-per-week system (FOSS alternatives // open-source facts). Extra content planned for sem break includes Linux installation pointers, Git learning, and contribution to FOSS (triaging/PRs/etc).

Event Planning:

  • Conducted a survey of activities by other Symbi clubs.
  • Blueprinted the first event, 2 required for official recognition. Will post details alongside curriculum
  • Inaugural event focuses on Git, Bash, and dispelling Linux misconceptions.
  • Interested individuals can register by DMing core team members.
  • Only prereq for RSVPing is showing the output of cat /etc/os-release

Promotion and Reputation Building:
Focus on word of mouth, Instagram, LinkedIn, and physical promotional materials. Exploring whether to create Instagram reels to visually highlight benefits of FOSS.

Check the FOSS Club SIT thread for more details & updates.

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With many open source programs coming up in 2024, a lot of students are looking for guidance on how to get started with contributions and how to eventually get in these programs.

We came up with the idea of organising an online event (managed end to end by the FOSS club leads) that explores “Pathways in Open Source”

This event would be a good guide for anyone interested in contributing. We will explore how to start contributions, various programs that you can get in through open source contributions and how to get selected.

We will be reaching out to folks from our nextwork who have been active in programs like GSOC or are regular contributors.

The event is tentatively planned on January 7, 2024, and the FOSS Club leads have agreed to take ownership of various responsibilities in regards to the event.

Outreach - Reaching out to potential speakers to ask them to submit a talk.
Creatives - Designing social media posters and related content for promotions
Marketing - Promoting the event in the FOSS United and FOSS Clubs’ network and in colleges.
Logistics - Setting up the livestream, we are currently planning for a Jitsi + YouTube/Peertube stream.
Speaker Management - Resolving speakers’ queries, making sure they are ready for their talk ahead of schedule etc.

Other general responsibilities will include making the event schedule, hosting the event etc.

Update - This is now called FOSS 101

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Minutes of the meeting

Community Call #2
Attendees - Ansh, @Pranav1 @glitchyi @Akshit_Tyagi @Anas_Khan

General Discussion

  • We discussed our plans for the upcoming FOSS Hack 4.0
  • Learnings and takeaways from the first session of FOSS 101

Advaith, FOSS Club MIT

  • Communication channels have been created for the club
  • The team is being encouraged to attain github certifications
  • An alumni reached out to conduct a technical session in React in February
  • The team is considering making a proposal for KochiFOSS

Pranav, FOSS Club STIST

  • Linux Installation fest was succesfully conducted
  • Regular updates are being posted on the forum
  • Busy with exams right now
  • A volunteer from FOSS United Kochi will be coming to the campus to give a talk
  • Brainstorming ways on how to create a developer mindset in the campus and encourage students to learn beyond their syllabus
  • A tech fest is being planned in march

Anas, FOSS Club TSEC

  • Have been occupied with the bureaucracies of club initiation
  • The core team is being recruited
  • Reached out to a github campus expert for a session on git and github
  • Future events on GSOC, and a Linux Installation Party are being planned
  • Discussions on finding a potential venue for MumbaiFOSS
  • Anas will start some mailing threads with the faculty at IITB
  • Interested in organising FOSS Hack in Mumbai

Akshit, OSDC - FOSS Club at Noida

  • No offline events have been conducted since our last call
  • Planning for CodeJam are underway.
  • 90+ registrations so far
  • Discussions among the core team and alumni to inspire the new members

CTA for Ansh

  • Get back with updates on FOSS Hack
  • Review sponsorship/grant requests from club events
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Minutes of the Meeting

Date: February 4, 2024

Attendees:: Ansh, @wisharya , @glitchyi , @Vishal_Kashyap , @Viswanatha_Kartha_V , @Soham_Kulkarni , @Het_Joshi , @Tushar_Bansal

Agenda:

  1. Updates on recent events and initiatives.
  2. Plans for upcoming activities
  3. Open discussion on FOSS evangelism, program structure and other queries

Discussion Summary:

Vishal (FOSS Club IIIT Kalyani):

  • 2 Weekly meetups conducted in January
  • Theme is FOSS alternatives of the week (Penpot, Linux)
  • Linux Installation Fest planned in February
  • Next alternative of the week (linux) post to soft launch the Linux Fest
  • Diversity at meetups is decent.

Advaith (FOSS Club MIT):

  • January - Event on developer essentials
  • The audience was diverse
  • Pointed out that female attendees are more interactive and interested in the event
  • Participants were later divided into groups on basis of domain they wanted to work with
  • Helped them set up development environment on basis of domain (eg webdev)
  • Also showed them how easy it is in Linux
  • Talked about general benefits of open source
  • Happy with the progress overall, the meetups are after 4:30PM and people are staying back after classes for the same.
  • Collaborated with ThoughtWorks for the second event on react fundamentals
  • Theory + Hands on
  • Yet to document the events,will do so in some time.
  • Cybersec event by the end of February.

Het:

  • Conclusion of the event in collaboration with IITB Trust Lab.
  • Paused the offline activities due to exams, online events are ongoing
  • In person session being planned on 22nd.
  • The team will be going for FOSSmeet '24
  • Happy with the overall progress, the students are being enabled by the community to learn more about FOSS
  • Plans to host competitions and monthly contribution sessions.
  • Plans to create a USB that contains 6 Linux distros along with projects on Linux

Soham:

  • Noted previous restrictions by college on events and efforts to establish the club
  • Had to invest 30% of time just for bureaucracy and to get the club established
  • Now focusing on contributions and technical initiatives
  • Successfully organized an unofficial event on FOSS with positive engagement.
  • Team will be contributing to open source projects while the bureaucratic processes continue.
  • Linux installation fest is being planned
  • Another event need to be conducted to officiate the club from college’s end

Tushar (IIT Bhilai):

  • Discussed the ongoing FOSS overflow coding phase
  • Conducted sessions on GSOC.
  • Participants displayed their journey with proejcts
  • Planning a CTF.
  • Working on setting up socials and expanding outreach.

Vishwanatha (FOSS Club GEC Palakkad) :

  • Had been busy with exams
  • Mentioned planning visits to organizations and building team projects.
  • Working on a project - a Telegram fork for college students.
  • Planning meetups, running a CFP a week before the event
  • Session on git/github
  • Documentation is pending, will be done in a few weeks
  • People are not well versed in coding and need to be mentored
  • Planning a session on creating malayalam fonts taking inspiration from SMC.

Open Discussion:

  • Het reminded attendees about the significance of creating own projects along with contributing to existing ones.
  • Soham and Tushar are interested in the hosting a local edition for FOSS hack.
  • I and Vishal shared updates on platform, FOSS Hack, the upcoming internship program, season of commits
  • Expanding reach of student programs
  • Discussions on changing the structure of FOSS clubs program in the future, and potentially introducing new student programs.

Next Steps:

  • Continue organizing regular meetups and events.
  • Focus on documentation efforts and outreach initiatives.
  • Encourage members to contribute to and create their own FOSS projects.
  • Follow up on planned events.
  • Document progress and feedback from ongoing activities.
  • Explore opportunities for expanding FOSS engagement in different regions and colleges.
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