Propose Birds of a Feather (BoF) session @ IndiaFOSS 2026

IndiaFOSS Conference IndiaFOSS 2026
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Birds of a Feather sessions (or BoFs) at IndiaFOSS 2026 are informal gatherings for participants to discuss a particular topic without a pre-planned agenda. Themes for the same can be (but not limited to) FOSS Projects, FOSS in Academia/Govt/Social Sector, Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Data, Public Policy, Digital Commons etc. Unlike talks or workshops, there is no “speaker” or “instructor”. Instead, a few moderators steer the conversation of the group to stay on-topic, and will ruthlessly shut off conversations when they are steering away from the topic.

Proposal guidelines

  • Duration: Each BoF Session will last for 60 - 90 mins
  • Proposals: Propose a BoF session in this forum thread. Please see previous threads Propose Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at IndiaFOSS 2025, Propose Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at IndiaFOSS 2024 for illustrative examples
  • Deadline: The deadline for BoF proposals is June 15th, 2025
  • The proposer will serve as one of the moderators and set the context for the session. Proposers who wish to participate in the discussion but not serve as a moderator should mention [Moderator Required] in the title of their proposal
  • The moderator’s role is to ensure that the discussion is interactive and everyone in the audience gets a chance to share their thoughts while making sure the discussion stays on topic

Unlike panels and talks, BoFs foster engaging conversations rather than formal presentations. Proposals should demonstrate a clear concept for the interactive nature of the BoF. For instance, “FOSS in the Rust ecosystem” is relevant as a BoF topic, “Tuning PostgreSQL for a specific workload” is not.

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Title: Community-Driven or Community-Branded? Who Gets to Shape Community Events?

Brief: A lot of FOSS events, meetups, devrooms, and community spaces describe themselves as community-driven. But what does that actually mean?

Is a community-driven event just an event organized for a community, or should the community also have a say in what gets selected, what gets discussed, and what direction the space takes?

This BoF is intended to discuss how much involvement the community should have in shaping community events. This could include talk selection, CFP review, public voting, deciding meetup themes, choosing discussion topics, setting the long-term direction of a local chapter, and generally deciding who gets to steer the space.

There are several things we could discuss.

Should talks and sessions be selected entirely by a small internal review group, or should the wider community have a visible role in the process? When does private review help maintain quality, and when does it become opaque gatekeeping? How do we balance expert curation with community participation? What are the risks of public voting becoming a popularity contest? What are the risks of everything being decided quietly in the background by a few people?

The key thing to resolve in this BoF is what “community-driven” should practically mean for FOSS and adjacent community spaces. I don’t think every decision can or should be made by public vote, but I also don’t think community spaces should become places where the community is only expected to attend, clap, and leave.

Ideally, we discuss models that actually work. This could include open voting, hybrid review, published review criteria, community feedback loops, public roadmaps for meetups, first-time speaker support, and ways for new volunteers to have a real say without making the organizer’s job impossible.

This BoF is not meant to be a complaint session about any one event or organizing team. The goal is to discuss how we can build healthier, more transparent, and more participatory community spaces.

If you organize meetups, run a local chapter, review CFPs, volunteer at events, submit talks, attend community events, or just have opinions on how community spaces should be run, this BoF is for you.

Discussion Format: Round Table Discussion. Ideally we’d spend at least 60% of the time discussing practical models and ideas that communities can actually use.

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I on behalf of FOSS Club (Coimbatore Institute of Technology) propose an BoF session on the following:

Title: Open Source Flourished. So Did Its Dependence on Proprietary Infrastructure?**

Key Focus :
To explore how the modern FOSS ecosystem increasingly depends on centralized proprietary infrastructure, and discuss how communities, organizations, and governments can reclaim ownership, transparency, and digital sovereignty through Open Source alternatives, decentralization, and self-hosted ecosystems.

Brief:
Open Source thrives on openness, collaboration, and shared ownership. Yet much of today’s FOSS ecosystem still depends heavily on proprietary infrastructure for code hosting, CI/CD pipelines, communication, cloud services, and developer collaboration.
While Git itself was designed as a decentralized technology, the surrounding developer ecosystem has gradually become centralized around a few dominant platforms.

This BoF is an open discussion for developers, self-hosters, FOSS contributors, students, and community organizers to reflect on what it means for Open Source communities to rely on proprietary infrastructure, and whether this dependence aligns with the values of software freedom and community ownership.

Discussion Points:

  1. What are the long-term risks of the FOSS ecosystem depending heavily on centralized proprietary infrastructure?
  2. How is the distinction between decentralized technologies like Git and centralized collaboration platforms often misunderstood?
  3. What practical challenges prevent communities and organizations from adopting Open Source alternatives & Can self-hosting, and interoperability realistically scale for larger communities and organizations?
  4. How are governments across the world and public institutions using Open Source infrastructure to reclaim technological sovereignty and reduce vendor lock-in?
  5. What role should the FOSS community play in building sustainable, independent, and community-owned infrastructure ecosystems?

Discussion Format:
Round Table Discussion. We’ll open with a quick awareness on which proprietary platforms participants currently depend on, then move into structured rounds - first understanding the problem, then mapping alternatives, and closing with what the FOSS community should actively build or advocate for. Goal: at least half the session spent on actionable ideas.

Moderators:
Members of FOSS-CIT:

  1. Akilan SP (Secretary)
  2. Dhanya Shree (Secretary)
  3. Ashwin Suresh (Technical Lead)
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