Agenda: Finalising dates and venue for IndiaFOSS 2026
We’ve decided on 26-27th September, 2026 as our first preference for the dates followed by 19-20. The dates were decided based on our preference to conduct the conference in September, while considering festivals and holidays that might affect availability of participants, volunteers (before the event) and pre-events.
This year’s conference will also be organised at NIMHANS convention centre, Bengaluru. There have been discussions around changing the venue for IndiaFOSS considering the increasing number of participants. In order to not rush things, we decided to go back to NIMHANS again this year, while we start planning for 2027 parallely.
@Ruchika and @Suslime will reach out to NIMHANS Booking office to check for venue availability. We’ll be booking the venue for a day in advance since a clash with another event a day before IndiaFOSS 2025 led to us not being able to do the venue setup in the evening, and volunteers had to stay at the venue till late night. We’ll also use the venue for pre-events on Friday.
Once the dates are finalised, @ansh will block the Samagata Foundation space for that week for other pre-events.
We will start working on a sponsorship deck for the event.
We will start looking for co-chairs for the event and setup bi-weekly calls for IndiaFOSS planning, and sponsorships.
We are organising a BoF on Planning IndiaFOSS 2026 at MangaloreFOSS this weekend. If you are attending, we’d love for you to join and share feedback,ideas and suggestions for the next edition - Planning IndiaFOSS 2026
Agenda - Discussing feedback from IndiaFOSS 2025 and ideas for the next edition
We should do a lot more workshops and pre-events. IndiaFOSS should be a lot more do-oriented
We should create pathways for people to directly get involved in the FOSS ecosystem. The curriculum project, mapping parties etc. are good avenues.
We also need to start participating and organising activities in cultural/city-wide events like BLR Hubba.
We should put out a call for communities that want to get involved. We can provide them with venues and resources to conduct their own events around IndiaFOSS (as fiscal hosts, sponsors)
The entire week of IndiaFOSS could have themes with certain events happening around then. (Design, Documentation, etc.)
We want to make the best possible use of the venue. How can we add more booths, for example?
We will use the space outside the venue by putting up a tent.
We will likely have more sponsors this year, so the sponsor booth size needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Prashanth suggested to organise a “Teens in IndiaFOSS” pre-event/track.
Conversation on expanding IndiaFOSS (future editions)
What does it mean to “grow IndiaFOSS”?
Bringing in more people? (5k,10k,20k)
Or expanding the reach of the conference festival to more communities, and over a longer period of time?
There was a discussion how bringing in more people to the conference might lead us to lose the “close knit” feeling that the event provides. Everyone agreed that it is better to
Instead expand the festival to more days - “India FOSS week”
Enable more (non technical) communities to organise FOSS/digital commons activities - FOSS in film, FOSS in design, FOSS in Science, etc.
IndiaFOSS (or India FOSS week/month) should be tens of FOSS events that happen all over the country. The conference itself could just become BangaloreFOSS
What parts of IndiaFOSS do we want to expand on?
More booths
More pre-events
More devrooms
Better workshops
How do we engage avg citizens to care about this? Tap into the cultures to propagate FOSS.
There’s a lot other communities can borrow from our experience of running communities. We should explore creating a conf.conf like forum for India.
A small discussion on Commons and FOSS
A point was raised as to how using a term which only technical people understand alienates a lot of others. We discussed if we could instead use terms like commons. Everyone agreed that for a lot of these activities it’s more about the messaging than the terminology. For eg. A screen writing workshop using Scrite is a FOSS activity.
Sponsorships
We’ll work on the sponsorship deck next, and start reachouts by Feb end.
FOSS pledge and other integrations for IndiaFOSS sponsors/partners.
I will reach out to folks I know from the Qt & KDE community to explore the possibility of a “IndiaFOSS Desktop Days” track on one of the days leading to the main conference.
