FOSS United Community Calls - 2024

This thread contains information about the monthly community calls conducted by the FOSS United volunteers.

The idea behind these calls is to sit together and get updates from city chapters with regards to monthly meetups, give updates on various FOSS United events ( CityFOSS conferences, FOSS Hack, IndiaFOSS), and open discussion with respect to various FOSS United initiatives.

While we expect at least one volunteer from each of our city Chapters to be present, the calls are open to everyone in the community.

Please drop me an email at ansh@fossunited.org if you would like to be sent a calendar invite for these recurring calls

References

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FOSS United Community Call - Jan 2024


The first community call of the year will be held on the 6th of January 2024, from 11AM - 12PM. The agenda is for the city chapter volunteers to give updates from their end on December and the upcoming January meetups, CityFOSS 2.0 Plannings.
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The community call for this month is being rescheduled to next weekend. Apologies for delay in the communication.

Date - Suday, 14 Jan, 2024
Time- 11 AM -12 PM
Link - Jitsi Meet

Minutes of the meeting

Community Call, Jan 2024
Attendees: Ansh, @Suslime @Sakhil_Ahamed @Faizan_Akhtar ,Benson, @PR454D

Pune

  • PuneFOSS 2.0 work is in progress
  • Community Partnerships with pre existing FOSS communities and user groups are being discussed
  • The communities have agreed to collaborate and are also helping with the venue search
  • CFPs have been opened, will focus on promotions to get more quality talks
  • All the auditoriums the team could find so far are costly, with the cheapest costing50k INR.
  • The backup option is college hall that can be arranged for free, they will be going ahead with that in case another venue can’t be found
  • Venue to be finalised by this week

Chennai

  • Jan meetup registrations and CFPs ongoing
  • ChennaiFOSS updates shared on forum thread

General discussions

  • Updates on FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS
  • Sakhil suggested to conduct IndiaFOSS on 21st September since it’s Software Freedom Day.

FOSS United Community Call - Feb 2024

Date - Saturday, 10 Feb, 2024
Time- 11 AM -12 PM
Link - Jitsi Meet

Agenda: Updates on City meetups and cityFOSS conferences, Plans for FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS 4.0, New platform release related and onboarding related announcements.

Minutes of the Meeting

Community Call Feb 2024

Attendees: Ansh, @iamimmanuelraj , @Muhammed_Shahmil_ka , @Faizan_Akhtar , @Arya_Kiran , GB

Date: February 10, 2024

Agenda:

  1. Meetup Updates
  2. CityFOSS
  3. Platform release
  4. Announcements

Pune

  • 15 days to go to PuneFOSS 2.0
  • Venue confirmation is pending
  • Registrations are ongoing, saw an uprise in ticket sales after a community partnership
  • CFP closes today, reviews underway.
  • The Commit Company has sponsored 40k INR

Chennai

  • Jan meetup - 35 participants.
  • Less turnout due to Sunday
  • Planning the next meetup at Zoho Office
  • ChennaiFOSS 2.0 page is live, preparations starting this week
  • Volunteer onboarding call this weekend
  • The commit company is interested in sponsoring the conference

Mumbai

  • Jan meetup was the biggest so far, happened at Powai, Redhat office with a participation of 50 folks.
  • Partnering with MumPy for the next meetup.
  • Volunteer onboarding call with MumbaiFOSS volunteers to be done.
  • Vishal is in talks with IIT-B for venue

Kochi

  • 44 participants in the last meetuo
  • Feb meetup in Litmus 7 space
  • 2 CFPs recieved, 2 will be from Litmus, 1 more is required
  • KochiFOSS will be organised in late 2024
  • Scheduling a meeting with IBS for a future meetup

Updates from FOSS United

  • platform.fossunited.org is now live. Official launch this monday. City chapters can create their user profiles and start reporting bugs to developers@fossunited.org or github.
  • The tech team will schedule onboarding calls for city volunteers to onboard them to platform.
  • FOSS United will be present at FOSSASIA '24 at Vietnam. Vishal will be giving a talk on “Strengthening India’s FOSS Community” and we’ll have a community booth at the event.
  • We are getting equipment and looking for volunteers for our media initiatives. Editing out short clips, interviews etc.
  • The Commit Company will be sponsoring PuneFOSS, MumbaiFOSS and ChennaiFOSS.
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FOSS United Community Call - March 2024

Date - Sunday, 16 24 March, 2024
Time- 11 AM -12 PM
Link - Jitsi Meet

Agenda: Updates on City meetups and cityFOSS conferences, Announcement + Details on FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS 2024.

Please email me at ansh@fossunited.org (or text on telegram) if you’d like to get a calendar invite for these calls.

Edit: This has been moved to the next weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience

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24 Mar 2024 | FOSS United Community Call

Attendees: Ansh, Vishal, Mangesh, Swastik, Arya, Faizan, Sakhil.

Swastik - FOSS United Delhi

  • Feb meetup was held at EPAM systems
  • 9 March, DelhiFOSS 2.0 at IITD.
  • 300 folks attended the conference
  • The organisers are taking a break after the conference, no meetups in april may

Faizan - FOSS United Pune

  • Planning PuneFOSS 2.1 (the team has decided to do only mini conferences in Pune since there is not enough interest for meetups.
  • Preparations and planning to start after end of this month.
  • Proposal will be made around June.

Sakhil - FOSS United Chennai

  • Updates on ChennaiFOSS 2.0
    Planning ChennaiFOSS 2.0
  • Attended a community meetup at IIT Madras research park. They are willing to provide venues for free for 3 events.

Arya - FOSS United Mumbai

  • MumbaiFOSS Updates - Venue is finalised.
  • 250 seater classroom is booked for the conference
  • Finalised 2-3 speakers through outreach
    Planning MumbaiFOSS 2.0
  • March meetup was cancelled due to less CFPs, registrations and no volunteers available to attend.

Mangesh - FOSS United Solapur

Action items

  • Release IndiaFOSS announcements
  • FOSShack local editions announcement
  • Hosts can choose to conduct it overnight or only in the day
  • IndiaFOSS CFP to be opened in April first week

Because of falling attendance in the community calls (and major events like FOSSHack and IndiaFOSS close by), we had stopped hosting community calls.

After follow-ups from various city volunteers we are happy to announce that we will be restarting FOSS United Community calls for city chapters starting November.

The agenda of these calls is for community members, volunteers and the foundation team to sit together and share updates from meetups, any potential blockers you are facing/help you need (finding venues,speakers etc.) and feedback/suggestions for community events.

While we expect at least one volunteer from each of our city Chapters to be present, the calls are open to everyone in the community.

Please choose a convenient time slot for the community calls. If none of the mentioned slots work for you, please reply to this thread with one.

  • Friday 8pm-9pm
  • Saturday 11am-12pm
  • Saturday 8pm-9pm
  • Sunday 11am-12pm
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Since there are city meetups happpening on 9th,23rd (and most likely 30th as well), the November community call will be held on 16th November, Saturday from 11AM-12PM

Meeting link - Jitsi Meet
Please ensure at least one person from each city community is present in the call.

Please email me at ansh@fossunited.org if you’d like to get a calendar invite for the call.

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Summary of the Nov Hyd meetup

  • we got lucky with the venue. The venue was spacious, was happy to sponsor snacks and hot beverages. And a few people from the venue joined and made for lively sessions

  • one of the speakers dropped out so we ended up with 4 sessions instead of 5 - which made for a very comfortable meetup overall instead of feeling rushed

  • at the last minute, we decided to attempt live streaming. The process is as follows

  • We created a jitsi meet

  • asked all of the speakers to join the meet

  • Asked all speakers to mute their computers

  • Only the current speaker enables their microphone. Everyone else keeps their microphone off

  • Only the current speaker shares their screen

  • We created a youtube live video - there will be a unique key for the stream

  • We gave jitsi permission to access the fossunited youtube account (this seems to need someone from the foundation setting up the stream) and entered the RTSP key

  • all done*

Big caveat is that the live stream had a low bitrate because we’re using meet.jit.si which seems to have bandwidth constraints. The livestream was still pretty good though. The bigger issue was that the stream just stopped from time to time so someone needed to constantly keep an eye on the stream and ensure that they re-start the jitsi livestream if necessary. This happened atleast 3-4 times if i remember correctly.

One of the problems at the venue this time was that their guest wifi was undergoing maintenance so the speakers had to use their own hotspots. Not great but not bad either because the hotspot can only used to display slides and audio. Having access to a guest wifi will make life easier next time.

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I somehow missed clicking on the “reply” button. Apologies for the delay

Minutes of the Meeting

Community Call Nov 2024

Bengaluru

  • Looking for more volunteers, especially for design.
  • FOSS United’s 5 year anniversary is in Jan, we’re planning a special event/conference for the same.

Chennai

  • Planning a meetup in December

Pune

  • Planning a meetup on January 4 and the next PuneFOSS conference on April 5

Other updates

  • Dates finalised for IndiaFOSS (20-21 September 2025) and FOSSHack (22-23 Feb 2025)
  • Started planning for the anniversary event. We will try to invite active volunteers from city chapters, student clubs etc.
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Is there a community call planned for Dec 2024?

Waiting for the city chapters to finalise dates for December meetups, so we can settle on a date for the community call when most people are available.

Will post a poll later this week.