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.