Passionate people, bad blood, yet United by FOSS?
On Aug 22, FOSS United’s Bengaluru chapter advertised a 10 min-session titled “Prevention of metabolic disorders according to Ayurveda” as a part of its August Monthly meetup.
Promptly after this announcement, a good section of community members got upset for various reasons - primarily for the disconnect in bringing Ayurveda to a systems meetup.
- There were accusations of Ayurveda being a pseudoscience
- Member representatives were shocked because they were not informed about this
- Clarifications around a 10 min ‘refreshing session’ being promoted as an OFFICIAL talk.
Upto this point, the key infraction was associating the FOSS brand with something majority of the community does not want to associate with .
In my opinion Aakansha was not swift enough to respond to this, and mis-read the trust that was at stake by making this announcement. Active volunteers were requesting for a clarification on the selection criteria for this session
These were not adequately answered by the BLR team.
This further snowballed when @knadh asked for cancelling/ postponing the meetup, understanding root cause and requesting a leadership change - citing breach of trust and failure of processes.
Very shortly after - @rahulporuri Informs us that the meetup is cancelled and the foundation is looking for new leadership for the BLR chapter. Sai also apologized to community partners.
What irks me here is the speed, sequence of decisions post his message - which resembles an authoritarian decision.
I strongly felt Kailash’s message was taken as an order and changes immediately made to pacify him.
Why did @rushabh have to acknowledge the Aakansha’s contributions first ? To me, the speed and tone of Aakansha’s removal eroded more trust than the first incident. It meant to me that FOSS united would dump you un-ceremoniously in a high-stakes situation.
I sensed there might be more friction behind the scenes, and requested an explanation, both parties kindly obliged.
Akanksha’s version shows her earnestly trying to work with broken processes, and communication gaps. It does show a important miss in-terms of black-box processes. This is in-compatible with a org whose core identity is based around FOSS.
Sai’s version highlights the resource constraints they have to tackle with as a non-profit. It also calls out the stakes involved, and the way forward.
After reading both, and having the luxury of perspective, I’m gravely disappointed in Sai for one aspect, his real-time handling of this event:
- Why couldn’t you as the CEO just cancel the august event and ask the community for more time to get to the root cause ?
- Why did you immediately ask Aakansha to step down after Kailash’s message? And why phrase it in such a blunt manner?
- Was any attempt made to communicate the difficulties faced by the community around CFP Reviews beforehand? #
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I also have to acknowledge Sai’s contributions: The monthly calls, orderly documentation of processes and the upcoming public review system for future conferences are all positive efforts.
They are also a significant step up from any of the volunteer or full time contributions to the org so far.
Its truly unfortunate the current chapter had to end like this, but the foundation has explicitly stated they are not banned. I hope they are not discouraged from participating in future FOSS United events due to this incident.
I hope to see the FOSS United team learn from this, and re-instate the Bengaluru chapter after collecting feedback from active members. Fingers crossed and hopefully we remain, United by FOSS.
*Multiple edits for brevity, or grammar, no changes to core message.
#Changed this point to be very specific.
Getting used to discourse’s editor 
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