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 need to sell at least 1500 if we want to have 2000+ participants.
~400 free tickets already allotted. Can do giveaways, partnerships outside that as well
Talks
113 proposals. Getting ~10 every day now and expecting total count to cross 250 by 7th June.
Reviews ongoing. Trying to finish up the existing ~60 proposals before deadline and start mock presentations
12 reviewers excluding Ansh and Rahul
Every talk will have 2 reviewers + James
Keerthana and James are helping with reviews coordination
Devrooms
Send a reminder email for CFPs
Proposal numbers are sent as weekly updates on Telegram
FOSS in Science is at zero, Policy is at 1
Not extending deadline any further after 15th June
Workshops
Soft confirmation from RV University. 2 halls blocked for entire day.
120 room capacity, can do 4 workshops
Another 2 weeks for paperwork
Expecting 40 people per room attending workshops
We have one solid proposal from Frappe and expecting one more from Mecha. Hopefully 2 more proposals show by 7th. Can open workshop tickets by mid july
Need to reserve some seats for RV students
How many?
10-15%
Workshop ticket sales
Sell 120 total + 10% no show
Split for each workshop: 30 from outside, 20 from RV
Targeting mid july to open ticket sales
Pricing TBD
Booths
24 applications. 15th July deadline
Updates from vishal
@vishal - donation for for-profit companies applying for booths?
Where to donate? - diversity scholarships, contributor tickets, FOSS project fundraiser, FOSS grants pool
Shouldn’t it come to the IndiaFOSS budget?
Mandatory or optional? Minimum donation amount if any
Sounds reasonable
Need to have a separate discussion to decide booth payments
Add Conference Ticket scholarship - Update form @Ruchika
Booths
85 applications → 59 approved booths
Can’t accommodate more than 60 booths
Need to document how and on what criteria we selected booths this year.
Design
Tshirt design ongoing
Speaker post generator is ready. Need to host and send it to speakers.
Speaker announcement post design is WIP.
Social media posts are on track.
Marketing
Creatives are ready, waiting for approvals.
Ashlesh to coordinate with marketing team and plan out content.
Logistics
We’ll be setting up a paid coffee counter this year. We have to figure out how to charge for this (tokens/directly to vendor etc.)
Hard stop for breakfast 15 minutes before conf starts.
Hari is visiting NIMHANS next week.
In talks with ACT fiber for wifi.
Crowd management -
Need to have more food counters this year
Offset schedules and ensure there is some overlap between sessions and lunch break.
Speaker management
Need to start working on speaker guide.
We should communicate information about tech checks to speakers beforehand.
Devrooms
AOSP schedule is frozen. No main track reccomendation
Data - Working on main track recco. Soft list of suggestions for main track was sent.
Hardware - No main track reccomendation. Soft list of suggestions for main track was sent.
Policy - Needs 1 hr more of content. We have sent them a list of relevant talks that might not have been selected in main track but may fit in the devroom.
Science - Waiting for updates.
Compilers -schedule is frozen. No main track reccomendation
Audi 3 can have limited (4) devrooms so it will be assigned on FCFS basis.
Others
Need to figure out remaining enthusiast/student ticket count and open late bird accordingly.
We can start sending free tickets to sponsors etc.
@Siddharth_Shivkumar will form a WG that looks into rejected proposals and ensures meaningful feedback was provided.
We won’t be doing community partner outreach this year. Incoming applications will be considered on a case by case basis. All community showcase booths are partners by default.
@James_Reilly put a lot of work on talk reviews, mock presentations, and the final schedule selection this year, and that is one of the reasons we were able to freeze the schedule a month before the event. The program committee has decided to promote James to a co-chair for IndiaFOSS 2025
We have freezed the main track schedule for the conference. We are hoping to announce this tomorrow (30 days before the conf!).
We’ll be removing inactive volunteers and add more (mostly on-ground) people this weekend.
Some discussion on the structure and duration of opening/closing notes and open house discussion.
Day 1 Opening note (30 mins) - @rahulporuri (20) - Annual report (10) ; Introducing the GB, charter, elections +community CTA (new programs, volunteers, GB working groups) (10). @ansh - IndiaFOSS kickoff and walkthrough of all activities (10).
Day 1 6PM - Closing note (10) and Informal discussion with speakers/sponsors + customised community CTA
Day 2 Opening note - 15 mins (IF + misc.)
Day 2 open house (5-7PM) - Going over the charter and discussion on governance etc.
The open house will not be recorded or livestreamed
We will add emcees by next week. Now that the schedule is final, they can start working on speaker intros etc.
[Optional] Get the introduction from speakers (with word limit - 300, 1-2 mins)
Only 2 emcees this year.
Staff/co-chairs will introduce invited speakers.
Ansh to finalise the list of active CFP reviewers and add them as volunteers on website.
Rahul to write a recommendation for [TBD] invited talk
Rahul to write a proposal for an [TBD] panel
Main track schedule is final. @Siddharth_Shivkumar to work on rejections for remaining (35) talks.
). We also plan to introduce virtual registrations this year (free of cost), estimating a total of 5000+ participants for the event.
