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Maintainer of the year
We define a Maintainer as someone who cares for a project or a community, and has developed the necessary expertise to provide that care. This award recognises people who have shown exceptional dedication to maintaining a digital commons project - reviewing contributions, fixing bugs, writing documentation, supporting users, managing user/contributor communities, fundraising, and keeping the lights on.
Choose your pick
Subhashish P
Aravinda VK
Prashanth Udupa
Shivani Bhardwaj
Jannat Patel
Vignesh Hari
Kishore Nallan
Aboobacker M K
0voters
The endorsements the above candidates received have been added as replies to this thread. If you’re a nominee, you’re welcome to post a brief endorsement below. Tell the community about your work in 2025-2026. Replies on this thread are reserved for nominees only.
There aren’t enough people working on language archival and documentation, so those who are naturally have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. Subhashish has been working on documenting low-resourced languages (which is jargon for “saving languages from extinction”) for a long time now, across various projects, communities and organisations. Notes from a Maintainer - Subhashish Panigrahi, OpenSpeaks
Aravinda VK
Aravinda has been thanklessly maintaining Kannada tooling (and more) projects over the last few years, some of which are being used by thousands of people in rural Karnataka. Some of his projects have over 50k users per month. ಅರವಿಂದ ವಿ ಕೆ / Arvind V K
Prashanth Udupa
Outside of creating an amazing FOSS project, Prashanth has been a very active participant in FOSS communities, speaking about his project and often just finding people he can collaborate with to improve Scrite. He’s also actively put out a lot of blogs to highlight progress. True building in public! Notes from a Maintainer - Prashanth Udupa, Scrite
Shivani Bhardwaj
There are only a handful of people like Shivani that I have come across - strong coding abilities while also being a great communicator, with an interest in nurturing and sustaining a community. Shivani regularly speaks at national and international conferences to talk about Suricata, and works full-time to help maintain Suricata. In addition, she volunteers to improve diversity in the Indian software/tech ecosystem, for instance, with the HasGeek RootConf community.
Jannat Patel
Frappe LMS has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years, and Jannat had a key role to play. Not only was she developing the product, but she also adopted a product mindset to shape Frappe LMS into the juggernaut it is today. She helped drive product adoption, bring new users, and contributors; and helped maintain the broader Frappe ecosystem by writing the monthly Frappe Product Updates Newsletter
Frappe LMS is one of the most popular, widely used Frappe products and hundreds of people have used the platform for trainings and certifications. Jannat has done a great job not just on the product, but also its evangelism within and outside FOSS communities.
Vignesh Hari
Vignesh Hari has been one of the driving forces behind the CARE project at the Open Healthcare Network, consistently demonstrating what exceptional open-source maintainership looks like. Beyond authoring code, he plays a central role in reviewing pull requests, mentoring contributors, maintaining engineering quality, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring that the project continues to evolve in a sustainable and collaborative manner.
His contributions span feature development, security improvements, bug fixes, and day-to-day maintenance across the CARE codebase. Equally important is his active involvement in code reviews and contributor support, helping new and experienced contributors alike deliver high-quality changes. This stewardship has enabled CARE to remain a healthy, fast-moving project while welcoming a growing community of contributors.
CARE is a critical open-source healthcare platform used to build digital public infrastructure for hospitals and governments. Maintaining software with this level of real-world impact requires a high standard of reliability, responsiveness, and technical leadership. Vignesh has consistently demonstrated these qualities through sustained contributions over several years and by setting the engineering standards that the community follows.
The best open-source maintainers are not measured solely by the code they write, but by the communities they build and the contributors they enable. Vignesh’s leadership, responsiveness, and long-term commitment have made CARE stronger as both a software project and an open-source community, making him a deserving recipient of the IndiaFOSS 2026 Maintainer of the Year award.
Aboobacker has been a cornerstone of CircuitVerse. The guidance, feedback, and support he provides to contributors are invaluable. His efforts have played a significant role in helping CircuitVerse grow and scale into what it is today.
We’ve been in touch with Aboobacker for around 2 years now, and it’s inspiring to see him and the Circuitverse team take out time from their day jobs and continue to not just maintain Circuitverse, but also run hackathons, participate in GSOC every year and several other programs. The project is used by thousands of students globally, and is only getting more popular!