FOSS Events Standards are guidelines for organizing FOSS events in colleges, cities.
1. Communication
The organizing team can start by creating a Matrix Room/Telegram group or any forum of choice, having all the volunteers or key volunteers in the group and a couple of people from FOSS United Foundation team.
2. Talk proposal committee (not mandatory for FOSS Clubs)
Once the CFP is closed, please request the FOSS United Foundation team to reach out to the CFP review committee. The review committee will review the talks or workshop within a week and share the selected proposals with the organizing team.
There are the branding guidelines and design templates from previous events to ensure consistent visual branding across conference materials.
4. Refreshment
FOSS United Foundation can reimburse up to â‚ą5000 (â‚ą40/participants), max 125 participants per events, for tea and snacks to host a FOSS event. You can claim the expenses using this form. It usually takes around 3-5 days on average for your expenses to get reimbursed.
5. Marketing
The volunteers/organizing team can spread the word in their circles and invite more people to join.
6. Eco-Friendly
Encourage eco-friendly practices for conference materials, such as asking participants to bring their own reusable water bottles, and using paper cups instead of plastic cups. Read low-waste reports from IndiaFOSS 2024 - [Planning] IndiaFOSS 2024 - #33 by Suslime.
7. Code of conduct
Make sure that you enforce the code of conduct to the participants. It could be through the RSVP, CFP form or in the newsletters send to the participants.
Add a mandatory CoC. Something like “Following the FOSS United Code of Conduct, and ensuring it is agreed upon by all attendees (such as by linking to it in the CFP/RSVP pages and Forum threads.” Perhaps having someone from FOSS United as part of all CoC contacts would be nice as well.
A clear forum for “all meetup organizers” would be nice - it could be a category here on this forum, or a group elsewhere.
Perhaps change “Telegram group” to forum of choice? I don’t see why every meetup has to use Telegram.
One thing I have noticed a lot across a large part of what FOSSU does is that a major part of the infra runs on non-free software (like the general collaboration using telegram, streaming/recordings being only uploaded to youtube, the announcements posts only being on twitter and so on).
This is fine to get more people involved in the community by keeping the barrier to entry low, but also is a bit hypocritical imo, claiming to be pro-FOSS and such but then on the other hand running a majority of the things on non-free software.
We should make it mandatory to maintain a presence in free software platforms as well (like bridging the telegram groups to free software platforms, using inkscape/penpot for posters, uploading the videos to a FOSSU peertube channel, be it on a public or selfhosted instance, and syncing the mastodon with FOSSU’s twitter.)
This will also help bring in more volunteers who might not be comfortable having to use non-free software.
I know my proposal is a bit radical, but implementing this would help a lot with the legitimacy of FOSS United. I can help with setting up these things if needed.
FOSSUnited’s main public space has already been bridged using my matterbridge instance.
As I said in the previous post, I can help maintain the infrastructure.
The thing is though, we could start by using mostly public instances of these services.
A good next step would be to start syncing the twitter with our mastodon (FOSS United (@fossunited@mas.to) - mas.to)
This is a bit hard considering most crossposters were shutdown when the Twitter API went paid, but we can do it manually for now.
For the next big FOSSUnited event, we could start streaming to a public peertube instance, in addition to youtube where it is usually uploaded.
Another important thing for the city communities, as well as FOSS Clubs, a hosting for all the photos and videos taken during the events.
The last time I was in a FOSSU event (which was the KolkataFOSS Septmber Meetup back in 2024), I was weirded out when I saw Google Drive being used to share the photos taken during the event. I thought I’d take it to @Subroto_Banerjee, but I forgot to. Now that I am leading a FOSS Club myself, this issue came to my mind just a couple of days ago and here I am, reviving this thread.
Anyway, what I’m saying is, How about we host an instance of NextCloud or Ente and give these out to City Communities and FOSS Clubs for the same?
The last time I was in a FOSSU event (which was the KolkataFOSS Septmber Meetup back in 2024), I was weirded out when I saw Google Drive being used to share the photos taken during the event.
We already have Ente albums for all the active city chapters. @Subroto_Banerjee let’s not use google drive/photos hereon for the meetups?
How about we host an instance of NextCloud or Ente and give these out to City Communities and FOSS Clubs for the same?
We should be able to create an Ente album for your club, can you take this up over email?
