We are excited to announce IndiaFOSS 2025, the fifth edition of the Free and Open Source Software (and Hardware!) conference organised by the FOSS United community.
IndiaFOSS 2025 is round the corner! The sponsorship deck for the event is now up. If you are an organisation that wants to give back to the FOSS Community, please reach out to us at foundation[at]fossunited[dot]org
A couple of important updates
Expecting 2500+ participants in person this year (66% ). We also plan to introduce virtual registrations this year (free of cost), estimating a total of 5000+ participants for the event.
Our online reach (averaging across all communication channels - telegram, YT, twitter, linkedin, newsletter) is 40%
We’ve refactored the sponsorship slabs after a good look at the finances of IndiaFOSS 2024. Last year, we ended up with a deficit of INR 10L and hope to finally make IndiaFOSS financially sustainable for the foundation.
50% discount on the Platinum and Gold tiers for all FOSS projects and companies.
The diversity scholarships program is significantly better structured. You can now know the impact you create in terms of the number of scholars your donation will support . This comes in 2 years after experimenting with this program and enabling over 150 folks from diverse backgrounds to attend the event.
Starting this year, we are making it a formal guideline for sponsors to highlight only their FOSS projects at the sponsor booths. We’re grateful that many sponsors had already embraced this practice voluntarily, and this guideline ensures it remains a core value of IndiaFOSS.
Active volunteers are picked from the CFP review workgroup (meetups)
Industry and Community partners are encouraged to join the CFP review team
5-6 reviewers ideally
Reviews to be done on rolling basis this year instead of after the CFP deadline
[Suggestion] Instead of everyone reviewing the proposals, specific CFPs can be assigned to different reviewers (based on their background?)
234 proposals for IndiaFOSS 2024, 30% got rejected in first round because of irrelevance to the event/spam/AI-generated content.
Schedule should be out at least 1-2 months before the event.
Reviewers will work with the proposers who apply early, giving them regular feedback on the talks.
Devrooms
All conference chairs voted in favor of devrooms.
A maximum of 4 devrooms can be hosted over 2 days
Registrations should be opened ASAP. Since devrooms are a mini conference in itself, it will require at least 3-4 months to get speakers etc.
The devroom organiser+volunteers will have to manage it end to end, reducing overhead on the foundation/IndiaFOSS volunteering team.
Additional costs for livestreaming and recording of devrooms are to be factored in.
We discussed potential devrooms and who might be interested in organising one - FOSS in science (@rahulporuri ), audio tech, open hardware ( @Amit_G@Balu_B ), OSS sustainability, SOSS (@Ram_Iyengar )
Day 0
We discussed the possibility of a day 0 (on Friday) specifically for workshops at IndiaFOSS.
Sponsor workshops and any other major workshops will be held on this day.
Depending on the number of devrooms happening, we may or may not have smaller workshops during the main conference.
A small ticket price (100-200rs) will be kept for the workshop as a token amount, to reduce no shows and plan better.
Currently looking at RV university or Samagata Foundation +Takshashila as the venue .
Received sponsorship confirmations from Plane and Juspay.
Shree is working on a Call for Devrooms [Draft] announcement. Will be posted by end of this week on the forum for comments. (deadline for comments is 28 feb)
We are going ahead with a day 0 for workshops (19 September). Venue will be either a college or a company office that can host multiple workshops simultaneously.
CFP to open in early may tentatively. Rolling reviews will start 2 weeks after the CFP opens.
We can have a maximum of 8 (but ideally 6) devrooms
Audi 3 is to be used for technical talks. (Day 1 first half will be allotted for the same)
-We have consensus on the top 3 devrooms. We’ll set up calls with them this week.
3 other devrooms are maybes for now. We’ll set up calls with the organisers after approving the first 3.
Diversity team has got progress with @grittypuffy and @Ruchika reaching out to speakers (due to nearing CFP deadline) and participants
Concerns regarding solo traveling among college students (even males), esp. women, leading to potential reduction in turnover, even for interested participants. A specific query was raised from a group in Jaipur.
Grouping scholars of same gender can address safety concerns of traveling alone, which can be done by obtaining their location in scholarship form.
Scholars have to meet criteria for scholarship by having some prior knowledge, interest and involvement in FOSS ecosystem. Further selection will be made on gender diversity and financial ability to make sure underrepresented participants get the opportunity.
This time, 50 students will get full sponsorship as opposed to 57 in IF24, where 39 were women
@Ruchika has been doing outreach to organizations for diversity sponsorship. Organizations that fund these initiatives should be reached out to and we should reach out to individuals whose funding will also serve beneficial in providing scholarship. Current funding is 10000 INR.
3 individual donors and 1 organisation have sponsored for diversity scholarship in IF24
We should discuss on keeping bar low for sponsorship for diversity by 5000
INR multiples instead of 15000 INR by consulting @fossdot on Telegram by @grittypuffy and @Ruchika.
@Muneer_S mentioned on college students’ lack of awareness of diversity scholarships and better outreach is needed for improving turnover.
Partial scholarships bring in a lot of overhead as observed in last year.
This was analyzed and deemed to be relative to people and travel distance figured it won’t be a problem if we have the amount estimate and place of travel from the applicant for tailored scholarship, which saves funds for other deserving candidates.
Diversity scholarship applications should open after June 1st week
13 Reviewing only after we have good enough number of applications
This needs to happen sooner so that confirmed scholars can book tickets for travel and accommodation in advance. This will happen in parallel to diversity sponsorship/fundraising.
FAQ has to be updated on the website. @grittypuffy is working on workshop and devrooms FAQ.
@rahulporuri has asked for breakdown on diversity scholarship.
Promotions will happen on newsletter and social for the above.
Ask FOSS club to recommend folks for scholarship (for non-volunteers), whereas @rahulporuri has mentioned the active volunteers for clubs will be a volunteer for IF25 and rest can apply for scholarship.
Statistics
The engagement for IndiaFOSS’s increased since last week.
419 tickets have been sold
75 CFPs have been submitted
Todo
Diversity scholarship outreach along with sponsorship by @Ruchika and @grittypuffy to both organizations and individuals.
Post on telegram about lowering the 15k to 5k for sponsorship by @grittypuffy.
Send email to folks for CFPs:
Maintainer of the month for CFPs
All sponsors and venue partners for all FOSS united events
City chapters
@Jeswin is to work on graphics for the diversity sponsorship and scholarship.
). We also plan to introduce virtual registrations this year (free of cost), estimating a total of 5000+ participants for the event.
