[Planning] IndiaFOSS 2025 - Celebrating 5 years of IndiaFOSS!

ansh · 30 January 2025 07:41

Minutes of the meeting

Attendees:
@Shree_Kumar @Siddharth_Shivkumar @ansh (conference co-chairs)
@wisharya @JESWIN_JOSE

Agenda

Expecting 2500+ in person registrations
Introducing virtual registrations
2x the number of booths (60+)
Ticket pricing to stay the same, merch prices will be increased
Contributor tickets to be highlighted better this year. We can run a campaign for this (@ashlesh )

Talks

The CFP form has been revamped to get better detailed proposals. (Revamp of the CFP form · fossunited/fossunited · Discussion #776 · GitHub)
Review process for 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.

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 )

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 .

Updated deck (https://fossunited.org/files/IndiaFOSS%202025%20Sponsorship%20Deck.pdf)
Started reaching out to previous sponsors, soft confirmations from a few.
Discussions ongoing with Plane, Grafana, Source Code Control.
Juspay mentioned that they are interested but it’s too soon for them to close it.

Ansh to set up a bi-weekly call at Wednesday 2PM. (done - Jitsi Meet)
@wisharya to work on the budget
@Shree_Kumar @Siddharth_Shivkumar will go through the above resources and continue asking more questions about IndiaFOSS

Thanks @Siddharth_Shivkumar for helping with the minutes of this meeting