Pretalx and Pretix setup for Open Source conferences in India

Conference
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Hey everyone,

We just concluded foss4g.asia/2026 and are gearing up for foss4g.in for summers 2027. One of the important bits of the conference is managing tickets and talks.
For the talks, we were fortunate enough to have an existing setup of Pretalx but had to manage tickets via excel and razorpay

Had a call with @ansh about this and IndiaFOSS uses it’s own home built tool: GitHub - fossunited/fossunited: fossunited.org

On call we also discussed a possibility for setuping a India pretalx where new conferences can be added as seen fit.

For example: https://talks.osgeo.org/ exists, and it shows all the past conferences, their schedule, abstracts and links to Videos in some cases. This not only makes it easy to collaborate and organize but maintains an archive as well.

Similarly, a sibling product pretix – Reinventing ticket sales for conferences, exhibitions, museums, ... exists but is not made for the Indian payments system (can work without it by manually adding payments in backend)

With all this context in mind, I propose we create both pretalx and pretix for any and all open source Indian conferences. It reduces overhead of figuring this out again and again every year.

Please share your feedback.

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Good to see a discussion started on this !

Got involved with IndiaFOSS last year. I’ve thought about pretalx. Have heard that pretalx review system works well (from a devroom organizer). Tracking reviews on our platforms (FOSS United Platform - FUP) has required external tools. In FUP tickets seems to work well, including transfers. CFP is Ok - had a pain in terms of devroom submissions, but I guess that can be fixed for this year.

I’ve felt at times that we shouldn’t be “reinventing the wheel”. We do use discourse for the forum, and I’ve felt on and off that the conference management should have followed a similar path. That said, adopting another software, and using it with FOSS United platform is not “my area” :slight_smile:

In the timeframe of IndiaFOSS 2026 itself I don’t know if we want to rock the boat too much. I think this is exactly the sort of thing that a new Technical Wokgroup should tackle (charter for this is WIP).

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Agreed. But it still sounds like a good idea for the foundation to self-host pretalx/pretix for other communities/events to be able to use it. That is the eventual vision of the platform as well but I don’t know if we’re at that stage yet.

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