IndiaFOSS 2026 - Planning

IndiaFOSS Conference IndiaFOSS 2026
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Notes from the IndiaFOSS 2026 BoF at MangaloreFOSS

Attendees: @ashlesh @Jeswin @ansh @shadow @knadh @Vishnu_Sudhakaran @Vinay_Kumar @rahulporuri @PrashanthUdupa @Shree_Kumar Deepa, Preeti, Advay, Luffy

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.
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