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