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.
We started with a discussion about booth sizes and shapes from last year. Shree said “L-shaped” booths are very confusing and definitely a no for this year. Everyone agreed on reducing the size of the platinum tier booth.
We need to decide on a set number of sponsors, along with the approx amount we want to fundraise for IndiaFOSS.
We discussed the OSS company discounts, and whether we want to continue with that model.
Rahul mentioned that apart from the difference in booth size (which most sponsors don’t make good use of anyway), there is no clear offering for Platinum sponsors. He proposed a two-tier sponsorship approach for this year, with and without booths. We spent most of the remaining time discussing this idea. I will not go into the specifics of the discussion and just mention what we have decided to go ahead with -
Here are the tiers, rates and perks for sponsorships at IndiaFOSS 2026 -
Maintainer Tier
5L INR
12ft booth
Same perks as last year’s platinum tier (logos on all branding, website and videos; SM mentions, etc.)
50% discount for OSS companies (this needs to be defined better)
Contributor Tier
1L INR
No booth
Same perks as last year’s silver tier (logos on branding, SM mentions)
To summarise, we are doing away with the Gold tier, and will only have two sponsorship options at IndiaFOSS 2026 - with a booth and without one. We are hoping this helps us make our pitch clearer, and also help us increase the number of sponsor booths we can accommodate.
The sponsorship brochure needs to have details about Devrooms and Maintainer Summit
Plan to include custom sponsorship tiers (coffee, meals, etc.)
Ansh and Rahul are in Bengaluru this week and are already pitching IndiaFOSS to companies/folks they meet
A/V and Photography
A/V vendors in the past editions of IndiaFOSS have been a pain to work with and have not fulfilled all their obligations. Looking for a different vendor this time and even looking for community member for videography, photography and social media management for the event
Proposals
Team is aiming to make call for proposals and booths live this week
We are looking to add more co-chairs this year with specific responsibilities assigned.
@rahulporuri to work with Jeswin, Dilip and Ashlesh to get everything ready to accept proposals for everything (speakers, booths, panels, etc.)
The group decided to use telegram just for instant communication and move any longer threads, such as feedback, to emails
We also discussed recording the meetings on jitsi to share it with the community/absent members.
Starting this year, volunteers will sign a confidentiality agreement in view of data privacy. Rahul to work on the template
Planning to ask partner organisations to send a reviewer or volunteer from their team to make the festival a collaborative effort
Sponsorship
@rahul and @ansh met with a bunch of folks in Bengaluru including previous FOSS United/IndiaFOSS sponsors and have gotten a positive response.
@ansh will be sharing the updated sponsorship deck with them to finalise the tiers.
@rahulporuri and I to work on the budget document for this year.
Tech
Add the updated sponsorship deck to the website
create different email groups for specific usecases. example (indiafoss.speakers@)
Feature to assign proposals to reviewers to make work division easier
A condition based text field where first time speakers are asked to share references for their talk and others are asked to share videos/recordings or anything similar from a talk they delivered elsewhere
CFP Reviews
We plan to have someone focus specifically on diversity for speakers and support them in the CFP process.
We will be running ‘proposal jams’ or something equivalent where proposers can get feedback to improve their speaker proposals.
FOSS United team to look for potential speakers from FOSS Clubs and City Chapters
The Co-chairs will do a first pass on all proposals to remove spam or totally AI generated content before passing it along to the reviewers.
