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.
Discussed this in our last GB meeting and with @rahulporuri. Notes from the two discussions:
Everyone agrees that this should be a FOSS United Event.
Consensus on not keeping this as a ticketed events.
Budgeting for this properly is still pending, needs to happen with the IndiaFOSS team.
Consensus on hosting it on 19th, the same day as the workshops.
@rahulporuri suggested we should just host it alongside the workshops at RV University. I agree - 2-3 classrooms of varying sizes (100/50/30) should work well enough.
I want to keep a few planned sessions. I was thinking of stuff like:
Grant Proposal Writing workshop.
Adopt a CoC for your project
Setting up Open Collective and other fiscal sponsorships.
Setting up a Mailing List for your project.
A few Birds of Feather sessions, maybe around Sustainability, and FOSS Sponsorship in India?
The rest should be an unconference, with enough space (both physical and temporal) for networking and breakout sessions - letting attendees use the time to their advantage. Maybe the Python maintainers want to get in a room to figure out upcoming 3.14 changes - we should enable such spontaneity.
Delegating acceptance to the IndiaFOSS Co-Chair (most likely, need to discuss this).
Don’t think Samagata will cut it as a venue. From discussions so far, it looks like we will easily cross 100 attendees, and Samagata doesn’t have the space for breakout rooms and multiple discussions. But I like the idea of having access to the space, we can use it for other stuff around IndiaFOSS (We need more events!)
Discussions so far have been positive. I’ve volunteered to take a lead on the Summit - so I’m holding myself responsible for how it goes. Action Items for me are:
Finding/Confirming a venue. Might have to visit RV.
Getting a interest form setup.
Setting up guidelines for acceptance.
July/August - Planning Logistics, finding speakers for the planned sessions.
Consider a soft-block at NIMHANS for 19th (@rahulporuri’s idea).
We plan to send out acceptance on a first-come-first-serve rolling basis, so applying earlier is better, once the form is setup.
A few Birds of Feather sessions, maybe around Sustainability, and FOSS Sponsorship in India?
Sounds good! The OpenSourcePledge team is also attending IndiaFOSS. We can also get someone from FLOSS/fund to do a portal+application walkthrough.
Finding/Confirming a venue. Might have to visit RV.
We are awaiting final confirmation from RV on workshops. They mentioned getting classrooms will not be a challenge, I can bring this up. Please feel free to accompany us on the next RV visit - need to do one post workshop venue confirmation.
Consider a soft-block at NIMHANS for 19th (@rahulporuri’s idea).
I’m reasonably sure that we don’t have enough budget for booking NIMHANS, we should be able to find another reasonably big office space with meeting rooms if RV doesn’t work out.
Maintainer Summit is a great idea. @Nemo’s proposal for a few planned sessions around an unconference-style event would work well if we have around 100 attendees.
Providing a platform for maintainers to come together can be considered a win in itself. Unlike the CNCF Maintainer Summit, the planned sessions can be broad rather than tied to a specific ecosystem or tech stack.
I think it is generally beneficial for every attendee if we have a broad definition for “maintainers.” Having individuals who steward Open Data, OpenStreet Maps, and other projects that follow the spirit of FOSS can bring diverse perspectives into the discussions. A notable example of this working exceptionally well is COSCUP. This can also help some of the smaller communities find a home in FOSSUnited in the future. Additionally, I believe there is already some overlap in the communities, so even if we have only FOSS maintainers, they may also be involved in these other communities.
Since @ansh mentioned that the Open Source Pledge team is attending, maybe they can also give a session on Fair Source. It is more beneficial for maintainers to hear about it and discuss it more deeply in an informal setting.
Another planned session could be on how to maintain an open source project, covering best practices that maintainers can follow, how to transition to a maintainer, how to balance code contributions with other forms of contributions, overlooked aspects of maintenance, etc. Perhaps this would be better as an unconference session.
I can help spread the word to maintainers and assist with moderating the sessions if needed. I will be in Bangalore at least a couple of days before the event, so I can also help set things up at the venue.
I will also be in Bangalore next week, and I can meet up if it helps us plan better.
@Nemo I’m not sure if there were any updates on Maintainer Summit but we were just discussing this in the conference chairs’ call.
If you plan to go ahead with RV as a venue, it’d be great if you can let us know the requirements (no. and type of rooms required, schedule etc.) soon. I’m already in conversation with them regarding workshops and it’ll be easier to just ask for another room right now than start this conversation again later. If the summit is confirmed, let’s also set up a webpage, put up a link to it on the IndiaFOSS website etc. over the coming weeks. We are hoping to announce the schedule (even if partially) by mid-July, and it’d be nice to have the pre/side events on the website up by then!
Summit is more or less confirmed, let us go ahead with the webpage. Budget changes was the open question that was left, and I don’t know how to answer that.
Requirements:
1 Large Room (Summit Venue), with seating for 100 people (80+ at minimum). Projector required.
2 Smaller rooms (30-40 people seating). If 2 is not feasible, we can do with 1 room as well, as long as it is near the large room.
Food requirements I guess can be shared with the workshop planning? We will have to add 80-100 to our original plan.
Date: 19th September 2025.
I also want to poke on the interest form setup - how can I help move that forward?
Food requirements I guess can be shared with the workshop planning? We will have to add 80-100 to our original plan.
We’re not arranging food for workshops most likely, since these are 3 hour slots that can be set up before and after lunch. If the summit is a day long event, we’ll have to get a quotation from RV (and ask if they’d like to sponsor this by any chance.) Will do.
Interest form, webpage - I think the easiest way is to create an event on the platform. Let me give you dashboard access and share more details on telegram.