(Internal) Annual Report 2024-2025

Organisation
1

Call to Action FY 2025-2026

IndiaFOSS

  • We’re pretty late for a Call to Action on IndiaFOSS. By the time you read this annual report, we might have run out of Tickets. But it’s still worth checking out the IndiaFOSS 2025 schedule, especially the devrooms
  • RSVPs for Maintainer Summit are still open! Maintainer Summit is a new pre-event for IndiaFOSS, and it is exclusive to FOSS creators and maintainers. We can accommodate up to 100 people in the venue so please RSVP ASAP if you would like to participate

FOSS in Education

  • We’re pretty late for a Call to Action with FOSS Clubs, as we have already shortlisted the FOSS Clubs for the odd semester (July - Nov 2025), but please reach out to us if your club promotes and contributes to FOSS in your college. We are happy to tell you about public events that your club could still participate in, and we will keep your in mind for the even semester
  • If you’re a faculty member interested in engaging your students and the FOSS community, please reach out to us. We are happy to organize a virtual or in-person session for the students and/or the faculty, work with you to do course and lab migration, and find mentors who can help your students
  • If you are a college administrator who is trying to understand the economic case for FOSS, please reach out to us. We are happy to share existing use cases with you about how FOSS adoption in academia can improve outcomes and decrease costs

Forklore

  • If you are the creator, maintainer, or core committer of a FOSS project, please consider participating in the Forklore campaign, a new program at FOSS United to put the individuals in the FOSS ecosystem on a pedestal

Grants

Check out our grants program and see if you’re eligible.

Events

  • If you are interested in participating in or speaking at FOSS events, please keep an eye on our Events Timeline for FOSS events around you

Support us financially

  • The FOSS United Foundation is an Indian not-for-profit organization. We are able to do what we do through the financial support of our Industry Partners. If you are interested in supporting us financially throughout the year, please consider becoming an Industry Partner
  • If you are unsure about joining as an Industry Partner, but you might be interested in sponsoring FOSS Hack or IndiaFOSS, please reach out to us. We are here for the long term, and we are happy to start small and build trust

Governing Board

  • September marks the sixth month of the one-year tenure of our Governing Board. If you are interested in steering the direction of the FOSS United Foundation and the Community, consider participating actively in the Community

Community & Foundation

FOSS Hack 2024

  • We started preparing for FOSS Hack 2024 in March 2024. We wanted to bring two key changes to FOSS Hack 2024 - the possibility of hacking in more than one location and the possibility of contributing to existing FOSS projects
  • Over the course of the coming months, we invited colleges and organizations to submit localhost applications, and after thoroughly reviewing them, we selected 13 localhosts where FOSS Hack participants from around the country could physically come together, hack, and motivate themselves. I personally attended the Hyderabad localhost at GITAM University, Hyderabad. Foundation Staff attended the Church Street, Bengaluru localhost at the Samagata Foundation office, and we heard great things from the BTL Layout, Bengaluru localhost at the Bruno office!
  • We selected 9 community-driven FOSS projects and 4 corporate-backed FOSS projects as the FOSS Hack 2024 Partner Projects after having long conversations with them about ease of onboarding for new contributors, existence of “Good First Issue”s on their issue boards, and more. We organized and streamed code walkthroughs for six of these projects, viewable on YouTube
  • When all was said and done, more than 3500 participants participated as more than 1600 teams and close to 400 projects were submitted by the hackathon participants, which is almost twice the number of projects created in FOSSHack 3.0!
  • Seven projects were awarded cash prizes, and five projects received a special mention from the Jury. It’s interesting to see that at least one (datadance, Placeholdr) Hackathon project received updates after the hackathon
  • Four teams also received special mention from the Partner Projects Hoppscotch, Keyshade, Kitty, Vyaakaran for their contibutions. Hoppscotch asked us to put them in touch with the participatns as they were interested in offering internships to the student team that contributed to their project, and Kovid Goyal, creator of Kitty, applauded the effort by the student team for attempting the complex problem proposed by Kitty
  • We continue our tradition of selecting the Hackathon Jury from the members of the FOSS United Community - Rohan Verma from Zerodha, Jannat Patel from Frappe, Jahnvi Patil from The Commit Company, and Vishnu Mohandas from Ente
  • FOSS Hack was shifted from March (FOSS Hack 3.0) to July (FOSS Hack 2024) because we believed that organizing FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS back-to-back would be better, but we realized soon that this was unsustainable pretty soon. FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS are both demanding events, so for 2025, we decided to move FOSS Hack back to earlier in the year, to enable sufficient breathing room for the organizing team between the events
  • <where is the budget breakdown for FOSS Hack 2024?>
  • For additional information, please see FOSS Hack 2024 - Results FOSS Hack 2024

IndiaFOSS 2024

  • IndiaFOSS 2024 planning started in April 2024, roughly around the same time as FOSS Hack 2024
  • Like FOSS Hack 2024, we pulled in members of the FOSS United Community to review proposals for IndiaFOSS 2024. We sincerely thank Amogh, Balu, Bowrna, Kaustubh, Shivam, Sudha for their effort
  • We were able to feature 35 community and project showcase booths, including two previous grantees, a previous IndiaFOSS sponsor, and a future sponsor for IndiaFOSS 2025
  • We are incredibly thankful for our sponsors - Platinum tier sponsors Project Tech4Dev and SquaredAI, Gold tier sponsors FSBA, Mecha Systems, OpenSSF, Requestly, and Silver tier sponsors Entri, GooeyAI, and custom tier sponsor JusPay. Fast forward into the future, we’re happy to say that Project Tech4Dev, Mecha Systems, and Juspay are back as sponsors for IndiaFOSS 2025, and we’re working to close one more recurring sponsor
  • We are also incredibly grateful for our anonymous institutional diversity scholarship donor, who supported the initiative with 1.5 Lakh INR. Fast forward to 2025, the institutional donor has committed to supporting the initiative for 3 years with 2.5 Lakhs INR every year
  • Feedback from the community on IndiaFOSS 2024 @ IndiaFOSS 2024 - Feedback
    • I’m long been interested in both technology/CS and public policy/law. I’ve been avoiding making a choice for years, but as I wrap up high school in a couple months, I’ve been acutely aware of the uncomfortable fact that I have to make a decision.

At IndiaFOSS, there were so many booths dedicated purely to tech policy. Many of my most interesting conversations and valuable connections happened here. I met with the founders of Tattle, a brilliant company that uses technology to combat misinformation and hate online. I spoke with members of the Internet Freedom Foundation (including the guy who sued West Bengal from above). Apart from this, a constant theme was the idea of contributing to society — sometimes indirectly, like solving problems, but often very directly with issues I want to work on, issues that very directly hit society — education, public infrastructure, health, and others.

IndiaFOSS destroyed this notion of a binary choice between the two. Honestly, this conference would have been worth it just for that. - Safwan Samsudeen

  • FOSS, Policy (lil bit of AI), Sustainability. I feel this was the theme around this year’s IndiaFOSS. I loved how they asked us to bring our own water bottles, napkins and reduce any one time plastic or paper waste. Overall, the event was very well-organized, though I felt like I had explored all the stalls by the end of day one. - Nathan Paul
  • IndiaFOSS 2024 was a low-waste event - [Planning] IndiaFOSS 2024 - #33 by Suslime
  • IndiaFOSS 2024 finances - [Planning] IndiaFOSS 2024 - #36 by fossdot
    • More than 27 Lakhs INR was raised for IndiaFOSS 2024, primarily from Sponsorships, Ticket Sales, T-Shirt Sales but we spent more than 37 Lakhs INR, primarily on Food, Venue Rent, and AV + Venue Setup, and Recording, Photography and Livestreaming
  • After the conference, we attempted to put together a Handbook for future IndiaFOSS organizers Home Page - IndiaFOSS Handbook
  • At the retrospective, we discussed the fact that we were disappointed at the last-minute schedule. We discussed how we weren’t able to dedicate individual posts to speakers, and how we had to group them together. We also discussed how speaker followups were difficult given that some of the talks were confirmed as late as the week before the conference. We also felt that the Proposals could be better
  • We also decided to bring in community help for key decision-making related to the conference starting next year. IndiaFOSS has significantly depended on the Foundation staff for the past three years (ignoring the first edition IndiaOS, as the Foundation didn’t exist then). We don’t believe that this is sustainable in the long run. While the Foundation staff want to be involved in the IndiaFOSS conference, we would be happier if we had help from the Community, and we believe it is better for the Community if they can step up and lead the conference organization
  • Finally, the video recordings took more time than what we’re comfortable with, so we will be focusing on improving this next year
  • IndiaFOSS 2025 planning started in late 2024, and we pulled in Shree Kumar and Siddharth Shivkumar as Co-chairs of the conference. Together with Ansh from the Foundation, Shree and Siddharth will be involved in all key decision-making for IndiaFOSS 2025
  • We’re happy to announce that IndiaFOSS 2025 already has a few confirmed sponsors, including Juspay, Plane, Grafana, and more
  • For additional information, please see IndiaFOSS 2024. We’re incredibly happy with how the videos turned out, please checkout the YouTube playlist

Governing Board

  • A Community-elected Governing Board was one of the main reasons why I was brought into the Foundation. Progress was slow towards setting up such a Board, until July 2024 when I met Ram Iyengar in-person. Ram/OpenSSF was interested in sponsoring IndiaFOSS 2024, and we decided to get dinner together when he was in Hyderabad. After a long conversation, i asked him if he would be interested in helping me setup the Charter for the Governing Board, and he immediately said yes
  • Starting July, Ram, a few staff at the Foundation, and I had regular public calls where we discussed what was expected of the Governing Board members, what the qualifications were for a Governing Board member, how we would run the election, the nomination process, and more. We had hoped to have a draft charter and community interest by IndiaFOSS 2024 but alas
  • Progress slowed after IndiaFOSS 2024, until Ram pulled us all back into sync with his energetic speech at the Fifth anniversary Bengaluru meetup in January 2025
  • Things moved pretty quickly after this. We had a draft charter that had the necessary skeleton but was missing the meat. We had already talked to a few active members of the Community about their interest in running for the Governing Board, and the Tech was just about ready
  • Harsh built the new Ballot platform where Elections can be scheduled, nominations can be filed, and voting can happen
  • Over the course of two short months - Feb and March 2025 - we sought nominations from the Community and closed them, we attempted to promote the submitted nominations within the Community, we asked members of the Community to sign up to the FOSS United Platform in order to vote on the upcoming election, and we had a short 1-week voting period
  • After a long night and multiple vote tallies, we announced the winners of the inaugural election of the community-elected FOSS United Governing Board
  • We received fifteen nominations when we expected three and more than four hundred active members of the Community voted in the election when we expected a hundred at best
  • We are now firmly on the path towards a Community-driven Foundation instead of a Foundation-driven Community, but we have a lot of work ahead of us in order for us to get there. The Foundation staff has a lot of information in our heads that we need to actively transmit to the Community and the Governing Board, and the Governing Board has to figure out how to juggle their existing professional lives, volunteering engagements, with the new Governing Board responsibilities
  • We have also received a lot of feedback about the election process itself - the tech we created to submit nominations had a significant number of bugs and UX issues, we discovered security issues with submitting votes, and very few in the community understood Ranked-choice Voting and that the order of candidates listed matters. There is a lot to improve for next years’ election but i’m incredibly happy that we are able to build momentum in the right direction
  • Ref Electing a FOSSUnited Governing Board, Feedback on the election process, Meet the first-ever elected Governing Board @FOSS United, Elections & Governance @FOSSUnited : Why, How, & When

FOSS Hack 2025

  • After resetting the FOSS Hack schedule, FOSS Hack 2025 planning started in December 2024, just a few months after IndiaFOSS 2024
  • We wanted to continue to successful Partner Projects and Localhost initiatives for FOSS Hack 2025. We ended up with 10 localhosts this time around, and four partner projects, including two repeat partner projects from the previous year
  • Looking at FOSS Hack 2024 and before, a surprising number of submissions didn’t even clear the basic requirements of a FOSS Hack submission - a README file in their GitHub repository, a valid Free and Open Source Software license, and a video demo. When we were thinking about how to improve participant outcomes for FOSS Hack 2025, we came across Aruna and Gautham from The Second Design. After multiple virtual calls and tens of hours spent understanding the FOSS ecosystem and the FOSS Hack hackathon, Aruna and Gautham put together a session aimed at actualizing the student participants. With a lot of students, “What to build” is a fundamental question, and their session helped the participants understand “what they wanted to build”, “what problems were meaning to solve in the world”, and most importantly, “what they were capable of building”. They demonstrated how a lot of successful FOSS projects live at the intersection of these three spheres. Their session also walked the participants through the fundamentals of FOSS licenses, helped them understand what made a good README file, and showed them examples of great demos from previous FOSS Hack editions. Ref Guiding FOSS Hack participants on what to build
  • A pleasant surprise arrived via email one day when Namma Yatri reached out to us a day before the event and asked if they could sponsor the event! We immediately jumped on board, and were happy to have organizations financially supporting FOSS Hack again, after a multi-year gap
  • In the end, more than 5000 participants, as part of more than 2500 teams, submitted roughly 800 Projects, twice the number of projects created in FOSSHack 2024!
  • 19 submissions were awarded cash prizes, and six projects received a special mention from the Jury
  • At least 8 FOSS Hack 2025 participant projects (goboscript, lansher, systune, jigita, wireview, tiffin-box, devb.io, stackd) seem to be receiving regular updates from the creators after the hackathon, which is great to see
  • Because of the large number of project submissions, the hackathon volunteers decided to rely upon a script to disqualify projects that didn’t meet the basic requirements as the first cut-off. But because of a misunderstanding, the script ended up rejecting valid submissions in the first round. We caught this issue and reevaluated all of the projects, because of which we ended up announcing two sets of results. We apologize for the confusion that this might have caused
  • Like before, the Hackathon Jury comprised active members of the FOSS United Community - Jahnvi Patil from The Commit Company, Rohan Verma from Zerodha, Hemanth Mangla from Namma Yatri (?), Hussain Nagaria from Frappe/Build with Hussain. We sincerely thank the jury for volunteering their time and judging the projects
  • While FOSS Hack has been successful in terms of numbers, e.g., number of participants, number of FOSS projects created, we noticed that few, if no, projects lived beyond the duration of the hackathon. Even teams that participated in the Partner Projects program didn’t seem to continue contributing to the projects, even though they were over the hardest hurdle in the FOSS ecosystem - onboarding. FOSS Hack 2025 was especially challenging with the advent of GenerativeAI - the judges informed us that a significant number of valid submissions were clearly created using GenerativeAI, adding a lot of noise to the signal. When FOSS Hack was started, hackathons were still relatively rare, but given the explosion of popularity of weekend hackathons in recent years, we believe that a fundamental course correction is required. From FOSS Hack 2026, we intend to change FOSS Hack from being a weekend-long hackathon, to being a month-long hackathon. Localhost participation and outcomes were also underwhelming at FOSS Hack 2025, so we decided to revamp how localhosts are selected going forward - active FOSS Clubs and communities can apply to be localhosts, and they will be judged on their history of FOSS contributions
  • See more at FOSS Hack 2025, FOSS Hack 2025 - Results

Grants

For full information, please see Funding and Grants

Project grants

  • Our project grants program was briefly paused in the first-half of 2024, as we figured out the way ahead
  • Rethink DNS came back into our lives at IndiaFOSS 2024. Murtaza, Mohammed Hussain, and I chatted during IndiaFOSS 2024 about the project and the grants program. Murtaza shared info on how the project was growing, but with the growth came higher costs. We kept chatting after IndiaFOSS, and we decided to do a follow-on grant to Rethink DNS of 7 Lakh INR. Of this amount, the Rethink DNS team will allocate 3 Lakh INR to current and future infrastructure costs. The remaining amount supports the two creators to continue building and growing Rethink DNS
  • I came across Prasun Anand and Zasper in the first week of 2025, when I was planning the January 2025 Hyderabad meetup. I invited him to submit a proposal to speak at the meetup, and I was already considering whether he would be interested in a project grant. His talk went great, and I asked him if he was interested in a grant request from FOSS United. After a short few weeks, we decided to go ahead and Support Zasper. At 9 Lakhs INR, it is one of our largest grants, and we requested Zerodha to consider co-sponsoring the grant to reduce the burden on the FOSS United grants budget. Peeking into the future, Zasper has tens of thousands of active users from across the world in August 2025, and is on a speaking tour across The Fifth Elephant conference, IndiaFOSS 2025, and Gopher Con India
  • Arya is an active volunteer with the Mumbai community and a maintainer of the Project Segfault project. Project Segfault provides privacy frontends, Pubnix services, and other useful services. They requested a small grant of 20,000 INR to support Project Segfault
  • Shrirang Kahale, a school student, runs the Albony Mirror Network to provide mirrors in India for linux distributions archlinux, linux mint, manjaro, and more. He was looking for a small grant of 50,000 INR to support the Albony mirror network. Fast-forward to August 2025, just one of their mirrors transmits more than 500 GiB of data, and he is scheduled to speak at IndiaFOSS 2025

Events

Community events

FOSS in Education

  • The mission to improve FOSS adoption and creation in the Education sector is close to my heart, and over the past year, we have taken a few steps to work with institutions from the sector to improve the status quo
  • I first met Anil from Kalvium at the Bengaluru anniversary meetup in May 2024. It was obvious that we should attempt to work together and over the course of the summer and the odd semester (July-Nov 2024), we attempted to start a few FOSS Clubs at Kalvium campuses. I delivered a virtual talk in October, as part of their Hacktober events, and Vishal delivered an in-person session on “Introduction to FOSS and Frappe” in November at their Baddi, Himachal Pradesh campus. This was followed by a virtual session to complete the introduction to Frappe.
  • The FOSS Clubs program was revamped in the summer of 2024 to steer the student community from exclusively organizing passive awareness sessions towards more active hands-on sessions. This came out of a chance encounter and multiple long conversations with the great folks from OutLawed India, who run a student program at multiple Law colleges. A special thanks to X, Y, and Z for taking the time to help us understand their program, which significantly influenced the way we think and our mental models

College credit for FOSS contributions

  • Ansh Arora came across Prof. Pankaj Jalote, Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of IIIT Delhi, and requested him to submit a talk for IndiaFOSS. He had recently completed a course for students on Software Engineering that was taught using open-source methodologies
  • After his talk at IndiaFOSS, he was interested in collaborating with us the next time he was scheduled to offer the course. Before the Jan-Apr 2025 semester, we reached out to a few FOSS projects, seeking projects that teams of 3-4 students could spend a semester working on
  • In the end, we provided two projects - one on improving the performance of the FOSS United Platform and another on improving the web accessibility of the FOSS United Platform. We selected two teams of 3 and 4 students, respectively, and over the course of the semester, mentored them to contribute to the FOSS United codebase
  • Both teams contributed meaningful changes to the codebase and walked away with glowing praise for the experiment, especially because it helped them understand how software development is a team activity and how FOSS communities work. Both teams of students received high grades in the course
  • The overall experience for the students could have been better if we had spent time making it easier to onboard new contributors to the FOSS United platform and if we had put together tasks of different levels of difficulty. None of them had prior experience with the Frappe Framework, branching in Git, etc, and we walked away with feedback on how to do better the next time around

Faculty Development Program

  • @Suslime organized a session at St. Josephs College, Chennai, where I was scheduled to talk about FOSS in STEM, advocating for an interdisciplinary approach to FOSS usage and creation in academia, and the need to enable adoption of FOSS tools across STEM fields in colleges and universities. I was told that a few faculty members would be in attendance, but I was surprised to find that it was going to be an exclusively faculty audience. Over the course of an hour, I introduced the faculty to FOSS tools across various STEM disciplines and how they could adapt their courses to use the tools. I talked about

Tech

The FOSS United Platform has matured over the past year, and as it matured, our vision for the platform also changed significantly.

A note on Security - we are all new to the Frappe Framework. Even though we had great mentors volunteering their time to help us build the Platform, security issues inevitably ended up in the Platform. This included authorization issues related to viewing and making changes to FOSS profiles, events, proposals, and more. Members from the Community reported the issues to us directly via security at fossunited dot org, and we strived to address them as soon as possible.

Staffing

  • @Suslime joined us as a Community Fellow. After seeing his volunteering effort at IndiaFOSS 2024, we had a few on-and-off conversations about a potential full-time position at the Foundation, and in November 2024, we brought him on board as a Community Fellow to improve local language FOSS advocacy in Tamil Nadu.
  • Ashlesh joined us as the Campaigns and Advocacy Manager in January 2025, after working on Campaigns and Advocacy at the Internet Freedom Foundation. Ashlesh helped us realize what an impactful campaign looks like, and has raised the bar for public communications at the Foundation
  • After almost two years, Riya and the Foundation decided to part ways. Riya’s last working day was the 11th of October, 2025. Riya significantly contributed towards furthering our mission - she helped steer and shape the FOSS United Platform, she piloted the successful FOSS Hack Partner Projects Program in 2024, and the structure she created for IndiaFOSS 2023 was one of the reasons behind a successful IndiaFOSS 2024. If I remember correctly, I first met Riya at the 2023 Anniversary meetup in Bengaluru, and I’ve had a lot to learn volunteering and working with her over the past few years. We wish her the best of luck with her higher education and her future
  • After almost a year with the Foundation, we decided not to renew Mangesh’s internship in September 2024. Mangesh worked on a lot of things at FOSS United, from looking after our self-hosted FOSS apps to contributing to the FOSS United Platform. His contributions were crucial to getting the IndiaFOSS 2024 schedule up and running, and he was central to the livestreaming setup at IndiaFOSS 2024. We’re happy to hear that after a brief stint at Ente, he’s working at Frappe
  • Aarav Raina interned with us part-time between March and May, 2025, primarily working on updating the endsoftwarepatents website
  • Jessica started volunteering with us from IndiaFOSS 3.0, interned for more than a year, worked on improving the website, posters, etc, and completed her internship in June 2024
  • Varshita Suresh and Karan Gandhi interned with us to work on Digital Marketing. Varshita and Karan started a number of new initiatives on social media, helped restart the FOSS United podcast, and worked on FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS social media promotions. Varshita has since moved on to X, and Karan continues to volunteer from time to time.
  • Ajzal led Design at the Foundation, and he established the digital visual language that everyone is now familiar with on the FOSS United digital platforms. Working with Ajzal was an absolute breeze, and Jeswin is holding up the high standards that he established for Design work at the Foundation
  • Venkatesh Hariharan stepped down as the Public Policy Director at FOSS United in May 2025.

Tech Policy

Venky led Tech Policy initiatives at FOSS United, and they screeched to a grinding halt when Venky moved on from the Foundation. We attempted to run a few of the initiatives that he started to the best of our abilities. Still, our interest in collectively deciding on the Public Policy charter meant that new initiatives weren’t launched during this period.

  • Technology+Policy course scholarship for FOSS devs is still active and continues to add to the small but growing cohort of FOSS developers with an interest in Technology Policy. We supported a total of 18 scholars to pursue the GCPP (Technology & Policy) course at the Takshashila Institution. One of the scholars is a co-chair of the IndiaFOSS 2025 conference, one ran for the Governing Board election, one is an active speaker in the FOSS United community and an IndiaFOSS 2025 proposal reviewer, one donated to the IndiaFOSS 2025 Diversity Scholarships initiative, one is organizing a Devroom at IndiaFOSS 2025
  • The failure/dropout rate for the course still remains high because of its demanding nature. Despite our best efforts to educate the applicants about the rigorous nature of the course. We have also struggled with the diversity of scholars. For these reasons, we have decided to make two major changes to the program starting late 2025 - only 50% of the scholarship amount will be paid upfront, and the remaining 50% will be reimbursed to the scholar upon successful completion of the course. If the scholar is unable to complete the course, they will be on the hook for 50% of the course fees. In addition, we are also considering limiting the number of scholars selected every quarter to 3 or 4 people
  • The scholarship was announced three years ago, and so we feel that now is a good time to evaluate the scholarship program, and consider extending it to courses other than those offered by the Takshashila Institution, or offer support for long-term fellowship work
  • The End Software Patents India initiative was kicked off in mid-2023. As part of the initiative, we started paying a small honorarium to Law students Gagan and Inu from NLSIU, Bengaluru, for the Software Patent Review (SPR) series
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