Partner Projects at FOSS Hack 2026

Hackathon FOSS Hack 2026
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The Partner Projects program is an effort to provide FOSS Hack participants with time and mentorship to be able to contribute to existing open-source projects.

The Partner Projects program is one of the reasons that has motivated the change in format of FOSS Hack to a month-long event.

A weekend is not enough time to -

  • Build a meaningful project from scratch
  • Go through the codebase and make meaningful contributions to an existing FOSS project.

Why?

This regards the fact that at FOSS Hack, you can either build a FOSS project from scratch or contribute to an existing FOSS project. These issues can be considered as potential problem statements for the hackathon. Discoverability has been a challenge in the FOSS ecosystem across both ends, and FOSS Hack serves as a great avenue for people to find projects they want to contribute to, and for FOSS projects and organisations to find more contributors.

Why should you become a Partner Project?

There are multiple other programs (GSOC, LFX, Outreachy) for Projects to find contributors. We have tried our best to differentiate and complement the structure of these initiatives while designing our own programs (FOSS Hack, Season of Commits).

At FOSS Hack, projects have the freedom to propose their own problem statements, depending on what they need the most help with. This is not limited to code, and we welcome proposals for issues related to documentation, UI/UX, bug bounties, accessibility, and other areas (We plan to select winners across each category).

Guidelines for Partner Projects

Expectations from partner projects -

  • Issue board with issues of varying difficulty. For instance, good-first-issue style issues that could be addressed within a few hours, and larger issues that participants could address across multiple weeks via smaller changesets
  • Issue board with non-code contribution issues. For instance, issues about improving documentation (user or dev docs), improved automated testing (unit tests, integration tests), design contributions (UI/UX changes to app and/or project website)
  • Contributing guidelines, e.g., CONTRIBUTING.md, and a well-documented software setup process for first-time contributors.

Good to have -

  • An IM channel of the project’s choice, e.g., IRC, Telegram, Discord, where interested participants can reach out to the maintainers.
  • An async discussion channel of the project’s choice, e.g., GitHub discussions, Discourse forum. Projects can feel free to use the FOSS Hack Telegram channel and the FOSS United discourse forum for these purposes if that is convenient for them.
  • Time for a walkthrough of the project before or during March 2026, e.g., recorded video of the app/project, the codebase, the setup, and the contributing guidelines.

Expected activity from potential contributors

  • Explore issues on available partner projects, and pick one or more to pursue further
  • Back and forth on project issues on the issue board, to understand the complexity of issues
  • After one or more contributions to the project, e.g., good first issues, they will “soft confirm” the project as their project for FOSS Hack 2026. There is no “hard confirmation” required from the project maintainer.

For the maintainers

  • No additional burden apart from the usual FOSS contribution process
  • No additional mentorship apart from the usual for new contributors.
  • No FOSS Hack-specific issues
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Feedback from Partner Projects

We received a large number of contributions from the community, and overall participation was very strong. There was a lot of interest from participants, and we saw many PR submissions throughout the hackathon.

Most of the contributions were smaller in scope and were mainly focused on Good First Issues. One challenge we observed was that many participants submitted PRs for the same issues, so while the enthusiasm was encouraging, we unfortunately could only accept the submissions that met the required quality standards.

Overall, the program succeeded in driving strong community engagement and bringing in a high volume of contributions, even though most accepted PRs were relatively small in size.

We did receive quite a few contributions from the community, though most were essentially AI-generated and templated. Due to our code standards, many of these have not been merged. Additionally, follow-up on our review comments has been very slow.

While we will continue to encourage contributors to finalize their work after our initial review, the volume of AI-generated content makes it difficult to gauge actual involvement for awarding meaningful prizes.

About FOSS Hack, we had seen that 4 separate teams were made to contribute to our project, a total of 12 members. However, we did not see any contribution from their side.

We received many PR’s on the Landscape Explorer. Some were, to be honest, spam, but others were good PR’s like, they reported issue’s , bugs, and suggested good new features for the application. In my opinion, these are quite good, so we have lined them up to include in our codebase pretty soon.

We received no comments on our projects from the FOSS Hack participants. So I don’t have any specific inputs to share with you.

The Osdag team of FOSSEE got two submissions, out of which one was of good quality. Unfortunately none of the other verticals of FOSSEE has received any submissions.

  • Contributions we received from applicants: contrary to the kind of response we expected from participants who chose us, only one team reached out. The rest of the teams did not open any issues or PRs to drive their contributions, and it is not clear what they submitted as part of their projects towards the end. The one contributor who created a PR also seems to have combined other Partner Projects and us as dependencies to develop a reasonably coherent hackathon project at the end. However, we are not aware of any bespoke needs for our project from them.
  • Quality of the contribution: the one PR we received, from this contributor, was of reasonable quality for a public feature that we have not yet made the default. It was merged into the codebase after a few iterations of review.

Overall, the programme seems to be a small win for us, as we received one contribution. I have one suggestion regarding the programme’s structure: it would be beneficial for contributors to be mandated to reach out to the Partner Projects in some way.

We did not have any contribution coming in through FOSS Hack participants.
So we are not in a position to share any meaningful feedback.