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 also plan to introduce virtual registrations this year (free of cost), estimating a total of 5000+ participants for the event.