We had a call with folks from https://www.ajaibghar.com/. They build products and conduct sessions around creative technology, showcasing how coding can help create music, art etc.
There are a lot of potential synergies between FOSS United and Ajaibghar (we have previously conducted events on creative coding - Code a Pookkalam) wherein we can conduct sessions that encourage people from non CS backgrounds to get into programming and create art.
We can also conduct workshops at FOSS Club campuses, city communities. They would like us to help them reach people from diverse backgrounds that can benefit from these sessions (we could think of navgurukul.org, JTD foundation at the moment) and operational help with these events.
We have also asked them to be active in the community and talk about their initiatives at our events. The long term goal here is to eventually start a creative coding/technology subcommunity that is not for CS people by CS people.
We had a chat with Gopi from https://scribbler.live . He gave an overview of the project, the various examples for how it is being currently used, what they have in mind for community engagement around the project, potential business/monetization strategies, and opportunities to get involved in the FOSS United community.
They’re based out of Mumbai and are happy to help host and speak at FOSS meetups.
They also conduct hackathons (to get users/example builders) for their tool/platform and we discussed the possibility of being community partners for some of these hackathons - the tool itself is open source and the notebooks that are created get shared publicly on github (we need to confirm that a FLOSS license is included in the GitHub repos of the participants)
I talked to Vihar @ Plane about a potential event partnership. Joseph Jacks (JJ) @ OSS Capital is visiting India next week and they are interested in organizing events with him in Bengaluru. If you don’t know, JJ is one of the Plane investors.
The event will be focused on Commercial OSS and is tentatively planned for a weekday late evening. We did a similar event with them last year in Hyderabad at T-Hub and they were wondering if we would be interested in being an event partner again. They are also happy to get venue recommendations.
Towards the end of the call, Vihar mentioned that they would be interested in being a sponsor for the next big FOSS United event. I mentioned the fact that we are hoping to organize a HydFOSS early next year (Jan/Feb) and that we’re still looking for venues. He asked me to reach out to him once the event is confirmed.
We had an interesting chat with Nitish Reddy about the ICANN and Internet Governance today. Nitish is a CA by profession but given his personal interest in Internet Governance, he was able to attend the recent ICANN Annual General Meeting (AGM) as an ICANN 81 Fellow. He talked about the need to improve Indian representation at international standards bodies like the ICANN, especially regarding new policy/regulations/standards that are being drafted at such bodies which have an immense impact on the Indian internet userbase (which is pretty significant by global standards).
We talked about the possibility of doing awareness sessions to help people understand the work that ICANN does and Internet Governance/standardisation e.g. talks at meetups and conferences. In addition, we talked about the possibility of supporting people who are interested in being involved in ICANN Working Groups/attending the ICANN AGM as fellows e.g. via a grant maybe.
Open Standards play an important role in the ecosystems that we live in and the work that ICANN and other such bodies has an incredible impact on the FOSS ecosystem. We didn’t conclude anything concrete - just that we would love to hear from him at a future meetup and we’ve asked him to start a discussion thread on the forum to gather interest in internet governance from the FOSS United community.
Thank you for the Introduction @rahulporuri. Will soon start a discussion thread on the upcoming events and initiate the discussion around this along with my fried @barkha_manral.