Notes from Maintainers Meetup Bengaluru (May 23rd, 2026)
40+ maintainers showed up at the meetup co-organised with Bangpypers. We discussed the foundation’s new Maintainers Program, AI in Open Source, Security, Taxation/Receiving sponsorships, OSS in Social sector, more AI in Open Source, and wrapped up with lightning talks from several projects. Notes from some of the sessions are below. I recorded the discussions and ran the recordings through Whisper. The participants were informed that we will record the discussions and publish notes under Chatham House rules.
Accounting/Taxation best practices for sponsorships/grants for commercial projects
Moderated by @PrashanthUdupa
- Prashanth runs an open source project, started monetizing it, and is incorporating a company around it.
- He is trying to apply for grants, setup GitHub Sponsors, funding.json, etc.
- Financial agencies and grant organizations typically can’t send money to a private limited company. Additionally, CAs don’t understand some of these things and/or how to handle them.
- Someone mentioned that they created a GitHub org to route everything through the PVT limited company. They suggested keeping personal and company expenses (and income seperately). They advised to move the personal repo into an org, then route GitHub Sponsors to the company
- If grant money lands in a personal account and you want to use it for company expenses, you have to declare it as an unsecured loan to the company; but that shows up as a repayable liability in company books and investors will ask about it.
- No clear solution was identified. The consensus was that no clear best practices exist for this problem yet.
There were additional discussions around Open Invention Network, GitHub downtimes, etc. 
Fragmented FOSS Communities and volunteering
Moderated by - @Shree_Kumar
I ran a session on “Fragmented FOSS communities and volunteering”. Premise of the session was that FOSS communities are fragmented. How do we get more volunteers who can do their thing, and even understand they can do their thing under FOSSU ? I gave the participants this overview and opened it up for suggestions. We had a 1 hr long discussion. The participants were a mix of folks at various levels of awareness of FOSSU. (that was the fortunate part)
Received these suggestions -
It would be good to have a “Volunteer handbook”. People who are looking to volunteer get visibility on how to get involved, and how they can contribute from this.
We can have an “open call to help wanted”. This gives visibility on what are the open short term volunteering opportunities.
Outreach to communities was suggested. We are doing this organically in various ways. What we are lacking is effectively addressing inbound interest.
What constitutes the “Aspirational part” of volunteering was a question that was raised. Contributing of FOSS projects has a visible impact, what about volunteering and how to position that.
Website improvement was another suggestion. Atleast 2 attendees felt that the website did not effectively give out these kind of messages. Having a volunteer handbook and effectively pitching volunteering was felt desirable.
Project Visibility
A maintainer had questions on how to get visibility for a complex, niche project that they’ve been running
- show the problem to fellow developers at meetups; out of 50, maybe 10 will try it
- X/Twitter can be useful but requires having followers first
- Conferences are useful if the project is commercial - but the problem here is explaining something complex
- Recalibrate expectations - don’t aim for mass adoption early, try to find a few people first
What helps with visibility
- Make adoption easy. If someone can’t try it quickly, they lose interest
- A proof-of-concept demo is more effective than explanation
- Reaching out to relevant newsletters to get featured
- SEO raised as something to improve; .dev domain noted as not SEO-friendly by default
- Writing blog posts and social media promotion
- Community meetups and events as a way to find interested people
Defining the audience
- When asked who the target is, the answer was “every developer”. There was push back on that being too broad
- Narrowed down to developers and maintainers who need reliability, specifically those building large apps with many features
- Embedded systems and database developers cited as communities already used to this level of rigor.
On FOSS United’s role in project visibility
- Suggestion that FOSS United could do more to surface lesser-known projects and communities. Someone gave an example of a Tulu Language Research Foundation project with low visibility
- Ideas floated: “community of the month” highlight, sub-channel for project features
- Challenge: how to choose fairly from hundreds of projects
- visibility of communities vs visibility for projects within communities are different problems
- Organic community growth comes from people finding each other at events and around shared interests
