Hey all,
It has been an eventful quarter at the FOSS United Foundation and we wanted to give you all a quick update.
Let me start with FOSS Hack 2024, happening this weekend (27, 28 July). The hackathon is happening virtually, like before, and in 13 locations around the country. Like last year, we are experimenting with Partner Projects, where the FOSS Hack participants can pick up issues from the partner projects and contribute to them. We were able to host and record code walkthroughs for several projects. We are lucky to have Rohan @ Zerodha, Jannat @ Frappe, Jahnvi @The Commit Company, Vishnu @ Ente, and Maneesh @ Lambdatest as Judges for this year’s Hackathon.
We are also working on IndiaFOSS 2024. The Early bird, Student, and Discounted tickets are all sold out - 1100+ tickets in total at the moment, including tickets for Speakers, Sponsors, Volunteers, etc. We are pleased that 10+ people bought the Contributor ticket to support the conference! 200+ proposals have been submitted for the conference, including 20+ proposals for workshops. Like last year, we are raising funds for the Diversity Scholarship program at FOSS United and we have already raised 25,000 Rupees. We were also very lucky this year as there has been a lot of inbound interest in sponsoring the IndiaFOSS 2024 conference. Conversations with a few potential sponsors are still underway but we are happy to announce that Project Tech4Dev, Requestly, OpenSSF, and Entri are sponsoring the IndiaFOSS conference. We are also happy to have The Commit Company as a new Industry Partner this year and we’re grateful for the continued support of Sensibull. We are also lucky to have Bowrna and Sudha from Chennai, Amogh from Mumbai, Balu and Kaustubh from Bengaluru as CFP Reviewers for IndiaFOSS this year. Vinay Kumar will guide them given his experience with IndiaFOSS 2023.
We have also been working towards improving Transparency at the Foundation. Toward this goal, we tried conducting a regular Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with Rahul on weekends and we added notes from Partnership Conversations that we were having at the Foundation. Santhosh Jose from the Community helped create the first draft of the Public Policy Charter for FOSS United. The charter is meant to help the FOSS United Community understand our Public Policy Engagements. We are continuing to work on the draft and it should hopefully be “ready” within a few months.
Last, but not the least, we have been working on establishing the FOSS United Governance mechanisms that incorporate the FOSS United Community. Luckily, we found support from Ram @ Cloud Foundry (Linux Foundation) towards this goal. Ram is the Chief Evangelist at the Cloud Foundry and a part of the FOSS United Chennai community. The OpenSSF sponsorship I mentioned above is because of Ram. Interestingly, over a dinner conversation with Ram, he mentioned that he helps run elections at the Cloud Foundry and we asked him if he could help setup Governance mechanisms for us. Thankfully. he said yes. See forum thread for initial thoughts. We are working on this in earnest and we intend to announce this initiative at IndiaFOSS 4.0.
I don’t want to make it sound like all is well at FOSS United. We have had multiple hiccups when organizing FOSS Hack, IndiaFOSS, and we have dropped the ball on a few action items. A major hiccup that came up in June was a permissions issue in the FOSS United Community Engagement Platform. A good samaritan from the Community notified us privately of permissions issues on the Platform because of which unauthorized (but authenticated) users could get access to information that is not disclosed on the Web UI of the Platform. We have been working hard to fix these issues and make the Platform more secure. However, given our lack of extensive experience with the Frappe Framework, the progress on this is slow. We are actively seeking volunteers who can help us in this regard so if you know someone capable, interested, and who has the time, please ask them to reach out to us.
There’s more to say but we’ll stop here for now.