I recently joined the FOSS United team to work on educational initiatives (FOSS Clubs, City Chapters and everything around them) and have been spending my first few weeks collecting feedback from the FOSS Club leads, Committee and the full time members. @Ruchika and I plan to use this thread to post about experiments, discussions, learnings, and the plan forward.
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To make collecting feedback more human and provide students the chance to connect with their nearest city communities, we are inviting active members of FOSS Club to their nearest city conference.
We started with LucknowFOSS on 4th April where we supported ~8 students to join us for the event.
Highlights
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IIIT Lucknow (Axios): We discovered that IIIT Lucknow has a very active FOSS Wing within their tech club, Axios, which we surprisingly hadn’t engaged with formally before. We’re starting a partnership by supporting their FOSS Weekend happening this week (sponsorship + merch) and will be exploring how to support them long-term without requiring any “branding” changes.
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UIT Lucknow: As our only consistently active club in UP, it was great to get facetime with their team. As the core team is preparing to graduate soon, we sat down to discuss changes we plan to make to the overall journey of clubs to make sure there are more incentives for students and there is an ongoing relationship with them.
Core Learnings
- The “What” and “Why”: Historically, our messaging has over-indexed on financial support, leading many to see us primarily as a funding body. For the upcoming onboarding cycle, moving forward we will be emphasizing the non-monetary benefits such as mentorship, hiring, and peer networks, that provide far more leverage for student growth. Financial aid will remain a tool, but it will no longer be the headline.
- Being more vocal There are incredible clubs doing FOSS work that we’ve never supported but have been in (constant) touch one way or the other. We need to be more proactive in being vocal about how FOSS United supports students and existing communities.
- Branding: A major takeaway was that students often feel they need to “rebrand” to get our support. We need to do a better job of messaging that FOSS United is an enabler/supporter, not a showrunner. Your club’s identity is yours; we just want to help you do more.
- Partnerships We received many questions about what organizations and communities they can partner with and what constitutes a “FOSS” activity. To fix this, we are working on clear, public-facing documentation at docs.fossunited.org to make our criteria transparent.
- Beyond Just Code: A major trend in FOSS Clubs has been an implicit pressure for everyone to write code. We plan on moving toward a broader definition of Digital Commons. If it’s built for the common good and is open, it belongs in a FOSS Club, regardless of whether it’s a pull request or a policy draft.
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FOSSMeet at NITC (10-12 April)
Attendees from the foundation - @Jeswin @ansh and I
We supported ~10 students from College of Engineering Vadakara, Christ College of Engineering, Irinjalakuda and St. Thomas Institute for Science & Technology, Trivadrum.
- Students specifically had challenges finding speakers for their events, communicating with the foundation members, and lacked mentorship. We’ve setup a follow up call with our friends from College of Engineering, Vadakara, to help them plan out events for the next quarter.
- We sat down to chat with the student leads of FOSS Cell at NITC and their faculty coordinator to discuss a year-long collaboration instead of a one-time monetary support. Two specific things they were looking for were a platform to showcase the projects they build and someone to guide them with design. We also invited them to join us for IndiaFOSS’26. The next batch of student leads will take over the next month, which is also around exam season, so we’ve decided to set up a follow up call by the end of the second quarter.
- We happened to bump into a speaker from NPCI who was interested in collaborating with us on initiatives similar to India Runs on FOSS. He was also interested in being a speaker at student events or mentoring student groups in the future.
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ChennaiFOSS 2026 at IIT Madras (18th April)
Attendees from the foundation - @Jeswin @rahulporuri @ansh @Dilip_G and I
Discussions
- Mumbai City Chapter: I spoke with Arya regarding the challenges they face in Mumbai, particularly with speaker availability for events. We also explored the idea of hosting high school hackathons to introduce students to open-source ideology through no-code and low-code tools.
- Club Engagement: Most FOSS Club leads I spoke to at the event seemed to be struggling with member engagement and articulating the incentives for joining an open-source club. I shared the contribution ideas list from the FOSS Club documentation, which is now finalized and ready for public sharing.
- While many students and clubs find it difficult to think beyond traditional coding, a huge shoutout to Sai University, Chennai. They have been leading the way with open data and compliance-related events.
- Met Bharath from the Government College of Engineering, Erode, who recently secured permission to start a new club in college. We discussed fostering digital commons ideologies and have scheduled a follow-up call to help them get started immediately.
- Also met Mithilesh, a project intern at IIT Madras. He is looking to engage more deeply with the Chennai community as a volunteer and aims to help the Foundation build stronger ties with open-source contributors within the IITM ecosystem.
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