[Proposal] Maintainer Summit @ IndiaFOSS

IndiaFOSS Conference
20

Notes from the FOSS United grants session (1 & 2) at Maintainer Summit hosted by @rahulporuri -

  • FOSS United has a 25L annual grants budget. Majority of this goes towards projects and ~10-20% towards FOSS events.

Project grants

  • Grants are one time (usually disbursed over a year). Projects have the option to come back and ask for a follow-on grant. See FOSS United’s follow-on grant to Rethink DNS
  • Grant types
  • Current grants evaluation process -
    • We look at the person first and then the project. It’s easier for us to support people who already have significant experience in the OSS ecosystem.
    • We look at the use case of the project and reach out to people who can relate/comment on it.
    • For small scale projects, number of users is not a deciding factor but the impact that the project creates on those limited users.
    • The grantee should be indian. The project itself does not have to be Indian origin.
  • There was a discussion around creating a proposals webpage, where the foundation lists down ideas that we want people to be working on. We’ve discussed creating a Request for Projects page similar to Requests for Startups | Y Combinator several times now.
  • There was a point raised on why the focus is not being expanded to all DPGs. We are exclusively looking at FOSS projects and are wary of the open washing that is prevalent in the DPG ecosystem. We are evolving our stance on this ecosystem and we come across more DPGs that are also excellent open source citizens - Storyweaver, Bahmni etc.
  • Grantees should be asked to publish periodic documentation and reports. We should set up a system of checks and balances in place for selected grantees.
  • Grants are not limited to software - we want to support open data and other forms of knowledge commons work. See Supporting OpenStreetMap community activities across India
  • Expanding on the infra grants, we want to talk to DO,AWS etc. for a credits program for Indian OSS projects.
  • We want to highlight certain stars in the ecosystem. They can be funded to go speak at certain events instead of the FOSS United team.

Event grants

  • Event grant requests are the most prominent (>1 every week)
  • Event grants are one time and we don’t promise to fund the next iteration of the event.
  • We typically go for the lowest tier of the sponsorship deck.
  • Event types - Hackathons > Devsprints > Conferences
  • 50-50 ratio of student vs professionals events.

Call to action -

  • Invite all attendees to get featured on forklore.in
  • Establish a grants working group with help from the community (that will also advise us on FLOSS/fund)
  • Check with razorpay and other companies that run incubators about a credits program.
  • Start working on a thesis that will give more structure to the grants program.
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