IndiaFOSS was great, now what?

Organisation
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Congrats to the FOSSUnited + IndiaFOSS team for a fantastic conference. This kind of an event, which feels like a “community space” is here to stay.

I had asked a few folks of what they think of FOSS United as an organisation and what can it do to create more value. Since I have been mulling over this for a long time, here are some thoughts.

The primary audience is students (70%), professionals (25%), FOSS contributors / activists / enthusiasts (5%) - just my general sense. The broad “world view” for FOSSUnited is that we need to help our audience be more self reliant and also aware and skilled at using free and open source software tools. Here is what I think is the core value we can offer to our community.

  1. Education - Help students / professionals learn about FOSS - help them become better skilled at technology, give them exposure / success stories and make them FOSS aware so that when they join the workforce, they are aware of FOSS. Similarly, help professionals take FOSS to their organisations by showcasing the vibrancy of the community.
  2. Jobs - Help students get jobs - use the community as an exchange for verified quality jobs.

Education

Most of what we do is education. The conference is about seeing people who have built successful careers using FOSS, so are city events about learning about new FOSS tools. We had also started an online platform - https://mon.school - which we could not continue as we did not have a leader with conviction. (FYI, close to 7,000 people have enrolled for Joy of Programming - which continues to be a superb resource).

At the same time as mon.school, we also started https://frappe.school - using the same platform (the platform was built for mon.school first, Frappe School was just an experiment). In the last 3-4 years, Frappe School has scaled beautifully well. More than 35,000 students have enrolled to 20+ courses, we run monthly batches (starting at ₹5k per student) and also certifications. The Frappe community is also similar to the FOSS United community (maybe with 15% overlap) and I am pretty sure that what has worked for the Frappe community can also work for the FOSS United community. (Frappe School also has a jobs section)

IMO this has to be the heart of the organisation. The college chapters need some “core value” to be attached to it, some core learning / courses that can scale with it. Otherwise it will become yet-another-meetup.

Education will also have the benefit of expanding the core community - this community can then be a right place to do other “political” things like public policy etc. FOSS United can be a great place where professionals, students and contributors can rub shoulders and help each other.

A community works only if all the participants “get more value” out of the community than they give. We should be strongly asking what value is FOSS United giving to its community beyond events.

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2

We’ve been mulling over similar questions for the past three months - what is FOSS United outside IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack. And the short answer is

  • curate and communicate resources for structured CS/Computing education using FOSS. For example, I started the thread Resources for structured Computing/CS education to document some of the resources that I trust, which people from the community have started contributing to. Note that we should document resources that are meant both for beginners and advanced programmers
  • incorporate FOSS into the existing college experience. The college experience isn’t going away anytime soon and it isn’t going to get dramatically better for the majority of students within the next 5-10 years either. We want to use the resources (mentioned earlier) to give students hands-on FOSS experience. While we will bring awareness (gyaan sessions) about FOSS projects, we will also push for action sessions e.g. short hackathons, lab migration work for Engg depts (e.g. https://fossee.in/), contributions to Projects within the FOSS United (and the broader FOSS ecosystem), and if possible support them financially to create FOSS
  • write and promote case studies of FOSS impact within the industry. These should become the ammunition for students and professionals to push for FOSS within organizations
  • support (if possible financially) cross-pollination of speakers from city chapters and student clubs. students should experience how FOSS is used in the real-world and the professionals can get an insight into how the new generation is using/understanding FOSS. This can include awareness (gyaan sessions) but here again, the focus will be on interactive and hands-on sessions
  • deep-dive FOSS sessions that are specifically directed towards advanced professionals. Multiple people have mentioned that the community focus has shifted too much to be beginner-friendly but we (and others in the community) also know about a number of the fantastic technical FOSS projects. Beginners will walk away only knowing the names/terminologies from the session but the advanced professionals should be able to get a peek into the technical details, architecture, design decisions, technical direction, etc from the sessions.
  • a renewed focus on discovering and financially supporting FOSS projects through Grants

I’ve been working on the longer response (and the overall roadmap for the coming year), which we will post by the weekend.

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