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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