I would like to propose a Maintainer Summit as a IndiaFOSS Pre-event. Perhaps on the day of the workshops (Day 0) or a day before that, at a separate venue. A Maintainer Summit comes from CNCF/Kubecon events. The first one happened at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India. It was described as:
The CNCF Maintainer Summit is an exclusive event for the people behind our projects to gather face-to-face, collaborate, and celebrate the projects that make “Cloud Native”. Programming will be focused on sharing best practices, diving into contributing processes, and solving common problems across projects to enrich our great community of maintainers.
The basic idea is to get a group of maintainers in a room to discuss problems and solutions around maintaining open-source projects. The most recent edition was at CNCF Maintainer Summit 2025, which was held a day before Kubecon EU 2025. The schedule is public, as is the post event transparency report which has some numbers - 382 attendees across 80 projects. The schedule has talks around CNCF Governance, Project-level meetings, Automating maintainer tasks, Security for maintainers, unconference sessions, and broad top-level projects/topics that impact all CNCF projects.
As this would be an experimental event, I’m thinking of the following:
50-100 maintainers
On either 18th or 19th September in Bangalore
Unconference (submissions and scheduling happen on a whiteboard at the event).
Focus on networking and learnings and collaborations.
Registration subject to approval - focus on a diverse set of maintainers.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be a FOSS United Event - could be something independent as well - hosting it as an separate meetup shouldn’t be too hard either. But wanted to run it here to see if a) This sounds like worth doing, and b) If it should be a FOSS United Event.
Discussed this at the BLR meetup today with Nabarun (who helped organize the first CNCF maintainer summit) and @ashlesh. Both offered some helpful feedback.
I am curious about what criteria we will use to allow registrations. LFX has criteria as listed on the website. We would need to follow a format, like LFX does, to have an actual quality discussion.
There are “maintainers” of so many projects, and allowing that many people may lose the original purpose.
If we want 50-100 maintainers to attend, we need at least 200+ registrations to have that turnout.
For the date we can go with 18th September because workshops are scheduled on 19th.
Not necessary to have a hard criteria, which is not really feasible as a broad conference. I was thinking of letting the IndiaFOSS team just approve/reject/waitlist registrations as they come in - prioritizing people outside Bangalore and trying to build a diverse gathering across ecosystems.
Perhaps a form that looks like:
Name
List a few project(s) you maintain.
Are you a Contributor or Maintainer or Creator
Do you live in Bangalore - Yes No
Topics you’d be interested in discussing with fellow maintainers: - Build systems, Security Contributor Challenges Monetization/Funding etc
We can do a small token registration fee (100 INR or so) to improve the turnout and limit to serious registrations.
I disagree - the workshops are tangential-ish to the maintainer summit. If we expect the maintainer summit to be a full day event, I’d recommend doing it on the 19th. Volunteers usually roll in a few days before the conference so we will have some capacity on hand to manage registrations and misc ops at the summit.
Even if 20 of those maintainers want to speak up for 20 mins, that’s a full days’ worth one-to-many or many-to-many interactions. We will likely have to handle catering in that case, which means token 100 INR tickets wont cut it. But this is an easy problem to solve - IndiaFOSS volunteers get free tickets using discount codes. We could create similar codes for the maintainers at the summit, and instead of free tickets, it’ll be the discounted tickets that cover only the food costs.
I suspect that there will be a reasonable overlap between the people who will have a Project Showcase Booth and the folks who attend Maintainer Summit - which is one more reason to have the event on the 19th and at NIMHANS - it’ll be easier for them to plan travel and to setup the booth before the event.
Could we make this a Commons maintainer summit and not just a FOSS maintainer summit? For example, would people from the Open Data (data for india), Indic Wiki, Open Street Map India, local language computing (language fonts), Servants of Knowledge (data preservation/digitization), etc communities be able to participate?
@Nemo , @Shree_Kumar , and others have significant experience with unconference-style sessions. so I’m not too worried about strictly adhering to a format (LFX or otherwise).
I’d prefer 19SEP as well, for similar reasons - workshops are tangential, we might lose a few potential attendees but it is far more accessible, especially for people traveling to Bangalore.
I’d be open to this, but depends on the registrations we get and how many we can host. But if we’re doing NIMHANS/19th, then space shouldn’t be a problem and we could perhaps host a larger number. Catering should be solvable, we can try to get a separate sponsor for the Maintainer Summit perhaps to help improve sustainability.
Unconferences are inherently experimental, but there’s ways to put some structure and focus to them as well (like how Barcamp does for eg). Ultimately, the quality of such events is based on the audience that shows up. Given that we’re vetting this to maintainers only, it has a higher chance of succeeding imo.
But I’d still treat it as an “Experimental/Beta” IndiaFOSS Event in its first iteration.
P.S - I’ve asked the folks at Samagata foundation to block the venue for the entire day on 18 and 19th September, since we are planning a bunch of pre events (cc @ashlesh ) and might need it for something or the other. In case you folks are interested, we can use that space for maintainer summit.