It’s a wrap! 2500+ registrations, ~2000 attendees, 100+ talks, 9 pre-events. We thank you for showing up in huge numbers at IndiaFOSS 2025 - India’s largest FOSS festival.
While a feedback form will soon be shared with all attendees sometime this week, we are creating this post if you’d like to share your thoughts while the event is still fresh in your mind. Blogs preferred!
My #1 feedback is that we need to limit the length of talk titles/give more coaching on good talk titles. We really want the right people to show up to the talks that they would be interested in.
I think makes our schedule overwhelming for people and it is difficult to decide. Also, expecting people to go through and read 40+ 500 word talk descriptions isn’t realistic.
Extensive use of insider lingo, or needless distinguishing from other similar talks when there aren’t any similar talks. So if there is only one talk on python you don’t need to be too specific compared to a full-day devroom that would be on python. In the Main Track especially we have a very diverse range of topics so that titles do not need to be specific at all.
On the flipside, you really want to hook people with your titles, so I think there is a level of coaching that is needed.
I appreciate the chance to speak at IndiaFOSS 2025, though I noticed uneven seating between Dev Room 1 and 2. In Compilers Dev Room 2, the casual setup with limited seats (1/10 the capacity of Dev Room 1), inadequate lighting, and a broken live stream, could be improved. I would have preferred presenting in a space like the buffet hall then the dev room 2.
I felt a bit disappointed after realizing that the talk which got the highest number of likes (across all tracks) has to be delivered in such poor conditions. Fortunately, it was very well received by the audience in the room despite the reviewer concern that it may end up being theortical. I would’ve liked broader reach and a bit more time.
NOTE: If you (the reader) attended my talk and agree with above, please upvote this feedback.
Sharing feedback that was shared with me personally or in the Open House at the end of Day 2 - as much of it as I can remember
Like last year, we can document posts about the event in this thread
Not starting a separate thread for it, but would appreciate feedback on the Maintainer summit (and maybe other pre-events) if you attended one here.
I had a community table and a talk in the hardware devroom this year. Due to personal extenuating circumstances, I nearly cancelled both, but fortunately got free the previous evening. I went home fretting about not being prepared and crashed from exhaustion. Only on 20th morning did I have any time to prepare the table and the talk.
I’m extremely grateful to everyone who accommodated me despite the risk it presented to the programming schedule, particularly Shree Kumar from the organising team and Amit Goyal, the track curator.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the room full, but then I was bracketed between two extremely interesting talks. I had no time to make slides and was waving around small pieces of hardware, so it helped that the room was also smaller and everyone could see things without a zoom lens. The moments of applause were extremely validating. Thank you to everyone who was present. I hope it was worth your time too.
I spent most of the two days in a bit of a daze and couldn’t visit the other tables or attend talks. My phone was buzzing constantly and for once I wished I had a map to the event somewhere other than my phone. The Mecha folks had a Comet prototype this year that ticked all my boxes, which made me want to give them money immediately. I’m glad they’re not taking money yet because I can’t give them money I don’t have. Going home without the satisfaction of a Comet in my pocket felt okay for this.
Without a map, I almost walked into the glass wall going to lunch. No entry??? A flash of annoyance followed by realisation. The venue has a lunch hall with a glass wall with only two narrow doors at either end. It’s always a chokepoint. Setting up a one-way route fixed this. There was no soap when washing my hands, but of course the venue has a policy of not providing soap in the washrooms. Kudos to whoever made the emergency purchase because there was soap the next time I washed my hands.
While I was stumbling around aimlessly, I did have many interesting conversations, with ideas that are usually difficult to articulate. People got where I was coming from. I got where they were coming from. That again is validating in a way few other experiences are.
Kudos to everyone who made this possible, especially the folks who receded to the background despite having their necks on the line if anything went wrong: Vishal, Rahul, Rushabh and Kailash.
Maintainer summit: This was a nice good idea and a great beginning. The un-conference format is just right. The arrangements were good, and the crowd size just right! I also liked the way you had an “orientation” session every few hours or so. Made the task easier for new people streaming in.
It would also be good to document the maintainer summit somewhere, so that we can refer to it next year - saying “this is what to expect”. Having folks post sessions in advance can certainly help. Maintainers would certainly have many to post.
The outreach part is where we can do better. Pre-events were listed way later - though the need for listing them early was raised a lot in advance. I’m hoping you’d be doing it again next year - in which case it might help to post this around the time when the CFP goes out. Will help people plan their travel too.
I’m Ayushmaan fromTeam Xeneva, and we had a wonderful time at IndiaFOSS 2025. We would like to extend our gratitude to FOSS United for giving us the opportunity to exhibit. The experience was entirely positive for us, and we have no harsh feedback to provide.
However, if we were to offer a suggestion, it would be regarding the presence of media journalists. We are unsure if they were in attendance, but there wasn’t specific media coverage for the community booths. A little camera coverage for booths like us would have been the cherry on top of an already wonderful event.
I agree about the Maintainer Summit being a great idea. I think repeating the intro session every so often just worked—that way latecomers could have the same context as people who were there from the beginning!
I also like the three main rules/points of the conference, including the Rule of Two Feet (freedom to walk away if you think a session is working for you) and You Belong Here (taking the fact that you’re invited to mean you’re qualified to belong in this space, and also assuming the same level of eligibility and competence from others—something that helped a lot for people like me who may tend to suffer from impostor syndrome).
The first few minutes after the first intro (or at least the first after I arrived; maybe there was another before?) was a bit awkward as nobody knew what to do, but asking everyone to come up to the whiteboard and arrange sticky notes helped kickstart the event and bring it to life! What I liked about the unconference format was that whenever I met someone else with common interests, rather than keep the discussion between us, I could schedule an event and get a larger gathering with scope for richer conversations.
Unfortunately, I had to leave halfway because I’d also found out at the last minute about the Accessibility Workshop, a must-attend for me because the project I’m working on (Convo) is NLnet funded and will have to undergo a mandatory WCAG audit eventually.
My one feedback about the Accessibility Workshop is that it was too hard to, well, access. @perry and I missed the first hour of the workshop, and while part of that was on us for leaving the Maintainer Summit late, having to hunt for the exact location within the college campus would have added at least an extra half-hour’s worth of delay. I am not sure how much could have been done in terms of signage on such a vast campus, but I think emailing the location (coordinates) along with the ticket would have helped us get there quicker. I say email because there may be people like me who are not on any of the groupchat platforms, but everyone is guaranteed to have access to their ticket!
The workshop itself was good once we stopped being lost. It did “assume” the use of Microsoft VS Code and Google Chrome, neither of which we had, but we managed with Emacs, Firefox, and a couple of live-reload scripts instead. (It was also conveniently close to where I was staying with family for the night!)
The IndiaFOSS conference itself was overwhelming as usual (in a good way, because there were so many interesting things going on and I didn’t know which to choose!). Between giving a talk, helping out at the Prāv booth, and waylaid by interesting conversations, I didn’t end up attending many talks but did manage to meet a lot of interesting people as well as visit most of the other booths. I didn’t notice any map of the booths; not a problem but it would have been a nice addition. I think the booths moved around a bit on the second day though, so perhaps it wouldn’t have been practical.
I noticed that there’s a lot more effort to reduce waste compared to last time, including encouraging people to bring their own bottles (but also keeping a steel sombu or two for those who don’t have a bottle on hand). There was even a prize for one randomly selected person who handed in a clean plate after lunch—I forgot to go see if I won 
but it’s a creative way to encourage less food waste!
Having a printout of the Audi 1 and 2 schedules at various places helped a lot, because I could remind myself at a glance of what was going on there. It would have been good to include the devroom session schedules as well: I actually didn’t end up attending any of them and it was in part because I’d end up only looking at the printed scheduled hung up here and there to decide where to go next.
I would also suggest using a table format for the sessions, or at least make sure they’re aligned in terms of time in some way. (both in the online and offline versions of the schedule). While the current designs looked good, I had to scroll (or look) back and forth and manually compare timings to figure out which sessions were coming up next.
Overall I think the conference was very well organised: the organisers, like a well-chosen font, were fading unobtrusively in the background, yet instantly recognisable 
A critical piece of feedback from one of the speakers - speaker pics will not clearly indicate their presence at IndiaFOSS 2025. We don’t have a standee on the stage or a poster on the dias, we don’t have signage around the projector/dias, and no other identifying details that the speaker was giving the talk at IndiaFOSS. This is important because without some identifier, the pictures become generic, and the speaker/org might be less inclined to post them publicly
For additional context, I vaguely remembering discuss this at the last minute with @Suslime (and maybe @ansh ) and deciding not to get the print outs to stick in front of the dias. We could come up with a reusable way to design/print the dias posters (cc @Jeswin )
Hi all!
It was my first time at IndiaFOSS, and it was a fantastic one! Definitely comparable to similar conferences anywhere else in the world :).
Special thanks to @ansh @Shree_Kumar and the other folks of the organising committee who made it possible!
@amit_pundir and I along with our volunteers Khasim, @vishal_bhoj and Sahaj handled the AOSP devroom, and while I was skeptical of having only us and the speakers in the room, we were very happily and pleasantly surprised 
In terms of organising, it was a very well run event. A few minor things come to mind, which hopefully would warrant a discussion:
Oh. It’s gone much longer than I thought - sorry about that! I’ll stop for now
I totally agree on some sort of signage in front of the dias - the NIMHANS one had some peeling paint etc, and so if it’s possible to do some generic + reusable ones, it’d be great!
Or even a small projector that only projects logo and /or speaker pics onto the podium - maybe idea for some diy building
This year IndiaFOSS design tasks were much better managed and produced better and significantly more design output than last year. Thanks to the design volunteers @antara_paul @Muneer_S @Arup_Matabber for making this possible. Also @ashlesh took it a step further with his copy.
There was a major change in the website design of IndiaFOSS compared to last year, which is still in a growing stage as this time many additional elements came in like Devrooms, Day-0, Pre-events. As a side note, we are working to create an archive for IndiaFOSS with all talks, speakers, proposals etc from all past IndiaFOSS editions.
These are some improvements required in:
Schedule Page UI
The Schedule pages need to be improved in UX with different sections for Workshop day, Conference day, Devrooms.
Conference Main-track should be the main content presented.
Workshops, BOF should have separate sections.
Devrooms should be mentioned in the main schedule page but the detailed schedule could be moved to individual devroom pages.
The PDF schedule with time mapping is very helpful.
Time mapping on the main schedule would also be good to have.
Speaker Posts
The current way of generating Speaker Posts through coded template has been helpful.
But could be made more effective by collecting data from Excel sheet and automatically exporting designs in batch.
T-shirt Contest
T-shirt design contest didn’t get the expected results but had some great concepts and ideas come from the community.
Would be great to have the same next year.
Venue Designs/Signages
Signages should have been more prominent.
More importance should be given to this as there were many confusions this time finding smaller devrooms.
Displaying a signage/direction board right outside the main entry door would be helpful.
Asked for feedback from one of my good friends, and got the below. I did ask him about devrooms specifically too :
I loved the energy in the conference. The food was good. The content was also well curated. I’m Inspired to volunteer next time. Things that I observed which could be further improived:
Dev room 2 on first day was very small. (The topic was clearly very interesting for many people)
I noticed a lot of young college kids, I think we can curate more content for them (like for e.g. the session on “cache tactics” and “your next server might be a browser” were excellent for young people)The topics curated in open data were excellent use-cases, these session and that track can be made even more better by mixing up with deep technical topics on data itself (depending on submissions)
Generally as you know me, I was largely alone in the session and I have 0 networking skills but I was not bored at all.
I spent more time generally in the dev-rooms than I did in the main sessions and I did like it very much.
Hi everyone,
For the Tech side on IndiaFOSS 2025 has mostly been on maintenance since I joined on August. Most of the codebase was written by Harsh tandiya, and I re-utilized most of it to add and solve nitpick issues.
Was not able to complete the schedule page re-design due to time
We had quick check-in system based on QR code this time.
Thanks to all the volunteers (@Neerav_Patel @j_damodharan @sharath_lingam kathiravan @Sejal_Jain @Tablaster bupd @iamimmanuelraj @grittypuffy @vijay_ganesh @shadow ) who stayed constantly to ensure for all checkins, the process went smoothly without any issues (I was scared hearing about last year lol)
Attendance: We had ~2500 tickets sold
Day 1: ~1900
Day 2: ~1400
This experience allows me to improve the platform more. Think of better workflow for users and make fossunited workflow system better.
Some vauge plans are:
TBH regiseration process was very quick, but it can be even quicker without needing more than 2-3 volunteers (IMO)
Scanning is almost instant, only issue is with Sticker tag (ID) writing
We should be simplifying Sticker ID next year, I dont think name matters here ( We can simply have generic sticker for Speaker, volunteer, Booth manager and so on)
Further meal check could also be done just like ticket check-in to track for our data
That’s it from my end. As always, feel free to open issues or discuss on improving FOSS United platform here: GitHub · Where software is built
It was such a great experience and fun talking with people who arrived at the event during check-in. Enjoyed it. It’s always my pleasure to contribute furthermore at foss united. Thanks for the recognition anyways 
@Dilip_G
The YouTube streams could be better organized if split into individual talk streams rather than an all-day stream.
The format of the meetup and the space at Church Street was just perfect for the kind of crowd that it brought in, except for the lack of coffee and/or soda 
I think the maintainers should be may be encouraged more to give talks on projects they’re involved in, at the unconference. I don’t know how other organizers incentivize that… but one way for this pre-event could be FOSSUnited swag? I don’t know.
We added timestamps to the videos to make navigation easier. Individual talk streams will require a lot of work I think, e.g., changing the stream ID via OBS in between talks, making the stream go live via YouTube Studio, etc. Maybe there’s an easy way to switch/automate this, that will make individual talk streams easier.
WE NEED ALL DAY COFFEE!!!
I saw the maintainer summit as a venue for meta conversations about FOSS and not about specific FOSS projects - but there is definitely scope for pre-event comms, e.g., ask the maintainers to come better prepared with meta questions/topics that they would like to discuss. I didn’t even know that there was a CFP for topics, but only 4 participants responded
May be the talks can be split and uploaded after the fact? I understand that this is all volunteer run and adds to the burden on an already stretched organizing team.
Individual streams with titles and other metadata will help with discoverability,[0] and possibly, broaden the reach of IndiaFOSS among casual surfers: For instance, if I search “KC OCaml” on Google or YouTube, may be this year’s IndiaFOSS talk shows up in top 10, if it was a separate upload?
As an aside, Gemini (Pro) and NotebookLM (free), will happily digest a 60m video & let you chat with it, but refuses to work with 3h+ videos.
Listing the maintainers (if they consent and if they are on ForkLore) attending the unconference may also help. A kind of a pre-icebreaker icebreaker, and do away with the initial awkwardness.
Gotcha.
[0] I asked a number of folks who showed up at our community booth why they weren’t attending this <interesting> talk, and they all said they’ll watch it on YouTube. And I thought I’d do the same, but searching for <interesting talk title> on YouTube didn’t yield the expected top result. I had to navigate to FOSS United’s channel and look for it. A minor inconvenience, but a major discoverability problem for those not already aware.