Name: Nammahari
Bio: I am hari from Chennai. I run Mahathaan. Apart from that, I also help volunteers organise FOSS Meetups across Tamil Nadu, mostly in Chennai, Coimbatore, and Madurai. I was FOSS United’s Community Fellow for Tamil Nadu. With the Chennai folks, I build small open-source tools for the community.
Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Personal site/ Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nammahari/
Home community: FOSS United
Years of association with FOSS/digital commons: 4 years since the start of FOSS United Chennai Chapter.
About My Work :
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My FOSS/digital commons journey:
I never knew what FOSS was before I started the FOSS United Chapter. I learnt through organising FOSS Events in Chennai, speaking with the FOSS United Volunteers and speakers.
Three years later, I’ve organised across four chapters in Tamil Nadu. Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Pondicherry.Somewhere in there, we also started building things like podu.pics for image hosting, kuruk.am for short links. tamilnadu.tech so every tech meetup in the state sits in one place ( this is a great hit ).
All this happened while I was doing my Fellowship at FOSS United Foundation for Tamil Nadu, where the state went from one active FOSS Club to more than six, all run by students & also started the Tamil Translation for Python documentation.
The most useful thing I did in that year had no code in it. I talked about FOSS in Tamil on YouTube channels people already watch.
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How and when I came across the FOSS United community:
November 2022 is when @fossdot reached out to start the FOSS United Chennai Chapter.
I loved the philosophy and how everything works in the community, which made me dive deeper into FOSS & the FOSS United Community.
I started helping with meetups after that and never stopped. The Chennai chapter has hosted 28 events since.
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Why I am running for the Governing Board
I have spent three years organising across Tamil Nadu. I want to take what worked in Tamil and in self-hosting, and make it something any chapter can run.
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Why I would be a good fit
As Community Fellow for Tamil Nadu, the state went from one active FOSS Club to more than 6, across both engineering and arts colleges. I also opened conversations with Agaram Foundation, Reap Benefit, and VV Charitable Trust, because most young people here aren’t in colleges we usually visit.
I have given plenty of talks in FOSS Communities in Tamil Nadu, including college clubs and events covering an introduction to FOSS, Frappe, FOSS in business, and academia. The Tamilnadu.tech communities repo has 315 stars and is now actively maintained, along with all other projects used and maintained by the community itself.
Started Tamil documentation for Python as an experiment, and now it is actively maintained by community volunteers.
This doesn’t stop at FOSS united chapters alone , years of nudging other communities in chennai to adapt FOSS has now made a good number of communities in chennai to collab and host FOSS meetups , Open Source Buildathons. one example is our friend Namma Flutter they runs joint event with us in three cities and open sources their work , namma wallet is their noticeable FOSS project.
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Things I would like to focus on as a GB member:
[1] Taking FOSS into Tamil and other languages, through people who already have an audience. Helping other chapter volunteers, with the support of the foundation team, to create regional content and publish. More than creating content, distributing it in the right way is what I want to help with; the first step is to write up what worked with Meta Monkeys and other YouTube channels as a playbook, so a volunteer in a different city can run it.
[2] Foundation / Community Tech and self-hosting: audit what we run on and what’s still sitting on someone else’s servers. Keep the public stack page current so other communities can copy it. Make the Community built tool installable and usable by any chapter or FOSS Community. I won’t personally maintain the foundation’s Infrastructure. What I can do is keep the question alive at board level and do the coordination.