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

[rahulporuri]

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 28th, 2026 June 15th, 2026
• 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.

[Balu_B]

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.

[ashwin_s]

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)

[Thejesh_GN]

Micro-granting in India

Background

I am Thejesh GN. In 2018, I started a yearly micro-grant of ₹1,00,000 in memory of my mother, called the Nagarathna Memorial Grant (NMG). The idea was to support meaningful work with no strings attached.

The reason for the grant can be anything that matters to the applicant and the people around them. While I personally prefer Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons, and public-interest work, that is not a requirement.

Over the years, the size of the grant has grown from ₹1 lakh to several lakhs, thanks to friends and supporters joining in. In 2026, the grant reached its largest size yet ₹5.6 lakhs with many people contributing and supporting the process.The idea is also not to grow beyond ₹10 lakhs as of now. Personally, I would consider any grant handling more than ₹10 lakhs/year in 2026 is not a micro grant. Even with the growth, the core idea remains unchanged, small, direct, trust-based support for meaningful work.

2027 will mark the 10th year of the grant. This BoF is an opportunity to discuss how we can encourage more micro-grants in India.

Key Focus

• Explore how micro-grants can enable meaningful creative, public-interest, community, and FOSS projects
• Discuss how to build communities around micro-funding and peer-to-peer support
• Understand the challenges involved and ways to overcome them
• Encourage more people to start and run small independent grants

Brief

In India, most funding for creative, public-interest, and open projects comes through large institutional grants. While those are important, micro-grants ( small, decentralized, peer-to-peer gifts or funding ) can often be more accessible, flexible, and liberating for both the giver and the receiver.

This BoF is an open discussion for FOSS contributors, creators, artists, writers, researchers, and community organizers to discuss about

• the usefulness of micro-grants,
• the realities of running them,
• and how we can encourage more people in India to participate in or start their own micro-funding initiatives.

Possible Discussion Points

1. What is micro-funding?
2. Who can fund, and who can receive?
3. How small is “small”?
4. What are the challenges?
5. What makes it rewarding or fun?
6. How do we encourage more people to participate?

Discussion Format

Round-table discussion.

We will begin with a short introduction to micro-funding and why it matters, followed by an overview of how NMG has worked, lessons learned, and challenges faced over the years.

The session will then open into a broader discussion and brainstorming on possible discussion points mentioned above.

Moderators

• Thejesh GN
• Will update

Note

I will make small changes to this as I gather more feedback on the session. But the core remains the same.

[gautham_sarang]

Can Modern Education Be Open Source?

I am an educator from Kerala working with homeschooling communities, alternative learning spaces, study tours, workshops, and micro-school experiments.

Over the years, I have worked with children, parents, volunteers, and educators across different educational models. This experience has led me to explore how education can become more collaborative, adaptable, and responsive to the realities of the modern world.

My interest in this discussion comes from observing how many alternative educators, communities, institutions, and even countries continue to work in isolation, repeatedly recreating similar educational systems and resources. We still lack dependable, openly accessible, community-driven repositories for learning resources, learning pathways, assessment systems, credits, and collaborative educational development.

Through this session, I hope to explore whether the principles that made FOSS successful, such as collaboration, transparency, accountability, adaptability, modularity, and shared ownership, can help us build more accessible, sustainable, and resilient educational ecosystems.

The long-term goal is to create better and more efficient educational systems that help children grow into capable, responsible, and active participants in shaping the society they live in.

Discussion Points

• Can education be designed using FOSS principles?
• What should be the purpose of education in the 21st century?
• What are the essential components of a life-centred education system?
• How can educators, learners, parents, and communities contribute to educational development?
• What would an open repository for learning resources, pathways, assessment systems, and credits look like?
• How do we ensure quality, accountability, and adaptability while remaining open?
• What mechanisms are needed to build and sustain such an ecosystem?

Format

A brief introduction to set the context, followed by an open discussion with participants. Duration: approximately 60 minutes.

Moderator

Gautham Sarang

A co-moderator from the FOSS community would be welcome.

[Badri_Sunderarajan]

FOSS in the Public Consciousness

This is inspired by @Muneer_S’s thread on how to engage the average citizen to care about FOSS,

How do we engage avg citizens to care about FOSS?

Recently saw this discussion on the IndiaFOSS planning thread and thought I’d add a bit to it. I’m sure a lot of people in the community have interesting ideas about this. My take So, how do we engage average citizens to care about this? Cultural penetration. Meeting people where they already are, speaking in formats they already consume. Maybe borrow from what already works. Political parties, social movements, and consumer brands have all cracked this code. They don’t lecture. They infi…

Background

To paraphrase the linked discussion: we have numerous FOSS events, and while they have their purpose, a lot of them are “preaching to the converted” in the sense that they are limited in getting more people to learn about FOSS. If you look at the reach of such meetups and conference outside tech circles, this reach plummets to nearly zero.

We need to think of ways to spread awareness about FOSS to people outside tech circles. Often, this could start with simply making people aware about better alternatives for the services they use—whether that “better” means ad-free, using less resources, or other practical benefits. This could be creators realising their platform of choice is slowly locking them down and squeezing their assets; small business having a niggling feeling that the data they share in benefiting platforms more than the platforms are benefitting them; or simply people thinking they’ve been asked to share their phone number in one place too many.

On the other hand, there are groups of people who share similar ideas to to FOSS (and the Free Software movement especially) such as wanting things to be run by the community in an open way and with people having a say, but they may not know how to apply this to software. One example at the institutional level: NGOs or research institutes collecting research data meant for the public good, but using proprietary software which causes the data to be locked down into proprietary formats.

Brief

How does one spread awareness of FOSS outside of tech circles?

One idea I had was to go and give talks about FOSS related topics in non-tech events and aimed at a non-tech audience. Other ideas included creating social media graphics and videos, advertising on buses and in metro stations, and sitting and interacting with people in public spaces (such as Church Street in Bangalore).

Coming up with more such ideas and turning them into concrete action points is, in essence, the agenda of this BoF.

Possible discussion points

These can be fine-tuned later based on feedback or live based on how the discussion progresses, but this would be the general idea.

• What does FOSS have to offer people outside tech circles? Are existing FOSS solutions competitive enough to be used outside tech circles (and which ones)?
• Identifying specific groups/demographics among whom we want to spread awareness
• What strategies have social and political movements done in the past to spread awareness?
• Ideas for FOSS awareness campaigns and their goals
• How to sustain interaction beyond just a single campaign?

Discussion format

An introduction to set the context, followed by a round-table discussion. We will leave a few minutes open at the end for free-flowing discussion and to exchange contacts in case people want to take this beyond the BoF and coordinate further.

Moderators

• @Badri_Sunderarajan (that’s me!)
• A co-moderator would be welcome; ideally someone who has been part of active publicity/community engagement, but anyone interested really

[Shantanu_Agarwal]

Title : AI-Driven Development in Practice

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Brief
There are emerging approaches — BMad, GitHub Spec Kit, structured JSON specs, prompt chaining, memory layers each with real tradeoffs. But there isn’t yet a shared vocabulary for what we’re trying to solve, let alone agreement on what “good” looks like.

This BoF is for engineers, team leads, and founders who are actively building with AI tools and have felt these tensions firsthand. Not to converge on one answer, but to surface what’s actually happening in the room - what’s working, what keeps breaking, and what we’d want from practices and tooling that don’t exist yet.

---

Possible Discussion Points

• How do you spec a feature before handing it to an AI? What format, what level of detail?
• What failure modes do you hit repeatedly? Drift across sessions? Hallucinated assumptions? Regressions that “should have been covered”?
• What frameworks or methodologies are you using (if any)? What’s their biggest limitation in practice?
• Is natural-language good enough, or do specs need to be machine-verifiable to be reliable?
• How do you think about context engineering - what does the AI need to know, and who’s responsible for keeping that current?
• What does “AI-first SDLC” actually mean for your team’s day-to-day?
• What would you want from tooling or methodology that doesn’t exist yet?

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Discussion Format

Round-table discussion:

• Quick intros - what are you building, what AI tools are you using day-to-day?
• Gather points of interest for discussion
• Structured discussion across the topics the room finds interesting
• What would better look like? If you were designing the practices from scratch, what would you keep, throw out, or add?
• Open floor - tools, experiments, experiences, resources worth sharing

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Moderators

• Shantanu Agarwal
• Happy to have more collaborators

[Badri_Sunderarajan]

Question: are proposals going to be seen here or do we have to submit it over at the CfP page?

https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/cfp

[ansh]

BoF proposals will be reviewed from responses on the forum thread

[aaditeshwar_seth]

We run an open-source project called the CoRE stack which is a geospatial data platform that brings together many datasets to characterize a landscape - village or watershed or waterbody - and enables easy access and programming on this data. We have proposed a workshop on Friday to give participants a hands-on feel of working with the CoRE stack data to build new applications on top of it.

In the Birds of a Feather session, we want to invite other groups working on similar projects related to environmental monitoring, building GIS dashboards, machine learning on remote sensed data, and especially researchers and academics working on hydrology, ecology, climate, and agriculture models keen to find ways to transition their work to deployment in the real-world. The BoF session will help carry forward conversations from the previous day and connect with new groups working in the same space.

We will try to bring together some groups we have already been collaborating with, such as partners from the Common Ground collaborative including Samaaj Data working on citizen contributed data of climate issues, Tarkam which is building a federated architecture for more seamless data sharing, and WELL Labs which is experimenting with the use of AI to collect and present landscape data simply to different stakeholders.

[nayan_grover]

Title: Why does a FOSS License matter? Which License is better and Why?

Key Focus:
The session aims to educate developers who are active patrons of the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem but often remain unaware of the pivotal role a FOSS license plays in ensuring that their code contributions meaningfully advance the movement. It seeks to spark a deliberation among developers, maintainers, advocates, and policy experts, inviting each to share their stance on which license they prefer, under what circumstances, and why. The underlying objective is not to leave everyone with a single, definitive answer. Instead, it is to equip participants with a clear understanding of the consequences of different licensing choices, so that they can make informed decisions aligned with their projects, values and vision for the FOSS community.

Brief:
It is often seen that developers who contribute to the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem give little or no thought to licensing. In some cases, they even upload their code to platforms like GitHub without any license, or they select one out of the popular ones without carefully considering its implications. This session seeks to address that issue so that contributors can make informed choices by understanding how a license type affects their project’s development, adaptability, and the benefit it brings to the FOSS community.

The goal is to give all participants an introduction on the importance of a FOSS license and its leading types, namely Copyleft and Permissive. From there, the session will invite experienced stakeholders in the FOSS movement — developers, maintainers, advocates, and policy experts — to share their experience and outlook on different licenses, explaining how each aligns with their values and vision for the community. Participants will also reflect on how copyleft licensing has shaped the tech industry’s engagement with Free and Open Source Software, and why parts of the FOSS community and industry later gravitated toward permissive licenses.

The session will also examine whether, for certain software categories or project goals, one license type offers clearer advantages than another. It will conclude by inviting participants to discuss which licensing approach would be more appropriate today, given the growing tendency of Big Tech companies to build closed services on top of open source code and gatekeep their own work.

Discussion Points:

• What are the main types of open source licenses (strong copyleft, weak copyleft, permissive), and how do they differ in practice?
• To what extent has copyleft licensing encouraged or discouraged the tech industry’s contributions to Free and Open Source Software?
• Why did parts of the FOSS community felt the need to shift towards a Permissive license?
• Strong Copyleft v. Permissive License? Is wide adoption and ecosystem growth more valuable than requiring downstream users to share improvements back to FOSS Community?
• Where do weak copyleft licenses such as MPL or LGPL fit as a middle path between GPL and MIT?
• How should Indian FOSS communities think about licensing choices in the context of growing tendency of Big Tech to gatekeep their own progress made on top of the open source code.

Discussion Format:
The session will begin with a short 5–10 minute primer from the moderator introducing the FOSS license, its importance, and leading types. This will be followed by a moderated, round‑table style discussion in which participants hear and deliberate on the perspectives of different stakeholders in the FOSS community including developers, maintainers, advocates, policy experts, and businesses, etc., with the moderator guiding and balancing the conversation.

[angela]

Title: Can We Build a Copyleft License for Community Data in the Age of AI?

Key Focus

As community-generated datasets become increasingly important for training AI systems, there is a growing need to explore whether existing open data licenses adequately protect community contributions. This session will examine whether copyleft principles, which have successfully supported open source software ecosystems, can be adapted to datasets used for AI development. The discussion will focus on attribution, reciprocity, data provenance, community ownership, and the governance of data commons.

Brief

Community-led initiatives across India and the world are creating datasets that support language technologies, accessibility tools, and AI research. However, many of these datasets are released without licensing frameworks specifically designed for AI use. This creates a risk that community-generated data may be incorporated into proprietary AI systems without attribution, transparency, or any meaningful contribution back to the communities that created them. Open source software have relied on copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL to ensure that software and improvements remain available to the community. As community-generated datasets become increasingly important for training AI systems, a similar question is emerging for data i.e. can copyleft principles and licence be applied to datasets used for machine learning?

A draft Community Data License has been developed by Viswam.ai and SFLC.in to address these concerns by applying copyleft principles to datasets. The proposed license seeks to ensure that community-generated datasets remain part of a shared commons by requiring attribution to original contributors, transparency regarding data provenance, and the sharing of modified or derived datasets under the same licence terms.

This session will use the draft license as a starting point for a broader discussion on the future of community data governance, open AI, and digital commons. The objective is to gather perspectives from developers, researchers, open-source contributors, civil society organisations, policymakers, and dataset creators on whether new licensing and governance approaches are needed to protect community data commons and how such a license could work in practice.

Discussion Points

• Are existing open data and open-content licenses sufficient for AI training datasets?
• How can community data commons be protected from extraction?
• Can copyleft principles be meaningfully applied to data used for machine learning?
• What should qualify as a derivative work in the context of AI systems?
• Should AI developers have obligations towards the communities that create datasets?
• How should attribution work when datasets are incorporated into AI models?
• Is open-source AI meaningful without transparency regarding training data and provenance? Are model weights derived from training data?
• What mechanisms can support reciprocity and contribution back to community-created data commons?
• How can compliance with community data licenses be verified and enforced?
• What challenges and opportunities arise when balancing openness, innovation, and community rights?

Discussion Format

Open discussion with participants. The session will begin with a brief introduction to the problem statement and the draft Community Data License, followed by a moderated discussion. Participants will be encouraged to share experiences, concerns, use cases, and perspectives from technical, legal, policy, research, and community viewpoints. The moderator will guide the discussion around key questions and explore broad conversation focused on the topic.

[Jafar_Saadique]

Title: FOSS and Co-operatives

FOSS and Co-operatives have a lot in common, especially in countering neoliberalism and privatisation in general. And every year we see talks and discussions around ways to make money in FOSS, seldom we talk about how we structure these financial entities and businesses.
The point of this BOF is to raise awareness of co-operatives, initiate a discussion about software and aligned co-operatives, talk about existing examples, and what it would take to incubate and nurture co-operatives with FOSS at its core and how a financially viable company can be run.

Discussion prompts:

• Co-op means no “benevolent dictator for life” structure. What kind of effect would this have to the enterprise and the project?
• Thought experiments. What if X was a co-op?
• Is having democratic value in an organisation sufficient without a legal structure to uphold it?
• Is co-op viable for your enterprise? If not, why?
• Would you join an existing software co-op? If not, why?
• Whether and how adopting co-op framework can boost the longevity and financial health of a FOSS project

Discussion format:

A small intro to co-ops, their functioning and examples so that the space can be inclusive to people who are new to the idea. And then open the floor with the prompts

Audience:

People interested in FOSS-based enterprises and who are looking to learn and discuss about alternative enterprise forms

Moderation: I am fine moderating this but would also like to participate in the discussion. Others are welcome to moderate

[Nivas_Ramisetty]

Title: Building a Multilingual Digital Commons: Learnings from the Bahu Bhasa Network

Background

Discourse on the digital knowledge commons, and the role of open technologies that contribute to its building and sustenance, has often been limited to English and other dominant languages, in India and across the world. Despite the presence of a rich linguistic and cultural landscape, growing investment in digitalisation across languages, and considerable efforts in language preservation and revitalisation, critical discussions around technological interventions in these spaces have remained confined to silos within academia, industry and policy-making, thus limiting the diversity of stakeholders in this very critical conversation.

Brief and Key discussion points

Drawing upon learnings from a convening last year on Indian languages organised by the Open Knowledge Initiatives programme at IIIT Hyderabad from the perspectives of policy, technology and community, this BoF session will aim to discuss subsequent efforts to set up a network of interested stakeholders to continue these conversations. Drawing from similar experiences within the larger cohort at that event, it will aim to explore challenges of community-building and gaining trust across diverse actors, especially how open projects (FOSS or Wikimedia) may grow contributor diversity beyond people who already self-identify as “open source people” and continue to keep them motivated beyond language or technology-specific interests. The conversations will therefore hope to unpack perspectives on community goals and engagement, collective memory and documentation, and resource mobilisation among others. It will also aim to discuss how communities of practice, whether organised around technologies, languages or both, contribute to building a multilingual, inclusive and accessible digital knowledge commons.

Discussion format

A quick round of introductions followed by a roundtable discussion around key points of discussion and engaging interested stakeholders to continue these conversations further.

Moderator

• Sneha PP
• Support: Nivas

[Shree_Kumar]

Title : United by (Free) F&B - aka Food & Books

Discussion : Anything goes. Free here is free as in “your” food… And feel free to get any books you want to pass onto others.

It’s a potluck lunch, relax. Each attendee (that’s your entry ticket!) needs to get a dish, which will be shared with everyone. Ideally the dish is home cooked, but we understand if that’s not feasible for everyone. We’ll probably make exceptions for store bought sweets and savouries. Let’s unite the diversity of your food and stories onto our combined table!

The menu will be coordinated on the forum, where we’ll keep track of the actual dish attendees are gonna bring. Quantities shall be discussed and communicated (e.g. typically get a dish for no more than 10 people, if sweets maybe 20 pieces etc). We’d have to stop accepting additions to the potluck at some point in time due to the logistics requirements at the conference.

We won’t keep it secret, but we’ll try to keep it safe ! On the table, we’ll probably just separate veg and non-veg, but that’s about as far as we’ll go during the pot-luck. Feel free to drill down with the makers of the dishes about the exact ingredients, the cooking method, recipes etc.

PS: International attendees may be let in without getting a dish. But we’d appreciate prior notice and confirmation. All that shall be coordinated in the forum.

Free software + Free Food + Books = Great conference !

PS: we’re looking to build on last years start with the potluck, adding books this year. We had a good selection of snacks ! Details in last years forum forum thread.

Suggested Scheduling : Day 2 just before lunch. This can be discussed.

Moderate Eaters/Moderators :

1. Shree Kumar @Shree_Kumar
2. @perry

[deepak_koul]

Title: Who Pays for Cognition? Open Source in the Age of Organization-Hosted AI Agents

Abstract

For the past few years, AI in software development has been viewed primarily as a personal productivity tool. Developers used AI assistants to write code faster, generate tests, or explain APIs.

A new paradigm is emerging.

Instead of AI being attached to an individual developer, AI agents are becoming persistent members of teams and organizations (See Claude Tag). These agents maintain long-term context, participate in communication platforms, perform autonomous tasks, delegate work to specialized agents, and contribute continuously to software projects.

In this model, cognition is no longer personal. It becomes organizational infrastructure.

This shift raises a fundamental question for the future of Free and Open Source Software:

Who pays for cognition when cognition becomes a continuously running organizational resource?

Open source has historically operated on a remarkable economic model: human cognition is self-funded. Contributors pay their own living expenses, acquire their own skills, and voluntarily donate their expertise to projects.

Agentic AI changes this equation.

Unlike human contributors, organizational AI agents require continuous funding for computation, memory, coordination, and reasoning. Every issue analyzed, pull request reviewed, test generated, architectural decision evaluated, and document updated incurs a cost that someone must bear.

This panel explores the economic, technical, and philosophical implications of this transition for the FOSS ecosystem.

We will discuss whether open source can remain independent when cognition itself becomes an infrastructure expense, whether organizations that can fund large-scale machine cognition gain structural advantages, and whether open models and local inference are essential to preserving the values of the FOSS movement.

The central question is not:

“Can AI contribute to open source?”

The central question is:

Who funds the continuous cognition of open source projects in an AI-first world?

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Discussion Topics

• The shift from personal AI assistants to organization-hosted AI agents
• Why persistent agents fundamentally change software economics
• Open source and the economics of voluntary human cognition
• When cognition becomes infrastructure instead of labor
• Who pays for project-level AI cognition?
• Do corporations gain structural advantages by funding machine cognition?
• Are open models and local inference necessary for the future of FOSS?
• Can open source remain independent if cognition becomes a metered utility?
• Will future FOSS projects consist of human maintainers, AI contributors, or hybrid organizations?

---

Key Provocation

Open source software was built on the cheapest cognitive substrate ever discovered:

humans willing to think for free.

Organization-hosted AI agents replace this with a world where every act of cognition has an explicit cost.

What happens to open source when thinking itself becomes infrastructure that someone must continuously fund?

Moderators - Deepak Koul , Abhishek Kumar

[shruti_namboodiri]

Title: FOSS for Justice — What can Open Source do for India’s Courts?

Brief:

India’s judiciary carries one of the largest case backlogs in the world, with over 5.5 crore pending cases. The government’s eCourts mission is pushing digital transformation, but the gap between policy intent and effective, resilient technology remains considerable. This BoF hopes to bring together builders, civic tech contributors, and open data advocates for a conversation that doesn’t happen often enough.

We’ll open by taking stock of what open-source tools and infrastructure already exist — in India and globally — for justice systems and public institutions, and where the FOSS community has significantly shaped outcomes. Earlier phases of digital policy programmes actively centred open-source tools and development processes to drive innovation and reduce proprietary dependencies. But as technology evolves and AI/ML solutions enter the picture, new questions arise: what should institutional stakeholders — such as judges, court administrators, and policymakers — understand about open-source as a community, how it works, and what it can deliver? How do we communicate open approaches to problem framing, requirements building, and tooling to public decision-makers encountering these ideas for the first time?

From there, the conversation opens up. We want to explore where the FOSS community can play a stronger, more deliberate role in Indian public sector innovation — not just as implementers, but as shapers of what gets built and how. A key goal is to develop specific, actionable problem statements from broad policy challenges, and to explore how a technical community can help craft a message and vocabulary that actually lands with decision-makers.

The details will develop as the conversation does — we see this BoF as much about figuring out the right questions as it is about answering them. If you work on civic tech, legal tech, open data, or e-governance — or simply care about access to justice — come argue, share, and help us figure this out.

Discussion Format: Brief context-setting (~10–15 mins), followed by open, moderator-steered discussion. No formal presentations — just people in a room who care about the same problem.

Proposed by: DAKSH (a Bangalore-based think-tank focused on law and justice system reforms and access to justice.)

[ansh]

FOSS4Good - Techies in the social sector

FOSS United Foundation’s 20,000-member+ community is primarily driven by volunteers spread all across the nation. Most peoples’ imagination of our work does not go beyond events, which is one of the reasons we have not been able to engage with volunteers interested in helping out with other efforts. One such part of our work is with the Indian social sector.

@knadh

I have realised that this sector has extremely limited technical capacity which seriously affects their ability to do the important social development work they set out to do, be it work with civic issues, poverty, education, or climate. Here, tech isn’t the solution to these problems (it rarely is), but is aid to solving problems better, reducing wast of time, money, and effort. Even tiny optimisations can be deeply impactful and meaningful in social development.

While just volunteers can’t solve for this vast requirement (which is why the OASIS alliance was created), techies can do wonders in this sector, just spending a little bit of time and effort with small organisations.

@knadh

Often, trivial advice can save an org significant amounts of time and money (which NGOs are always struggling for). Here are some actual examples from my experience:

• “No need to do all of that, just use WordPress. If you don’t have any way to install it, you can signup online on wordpress.org”
• “You don’t have to build a mobile app. A simple static site will solve the problem, has no maintenance, and can be done for free by using X, Y, Z …”
• “Just use Metabase for creating and publishing dashboards. No need to get any software built.”
• “Why not just use Whatsapp or Telegram instead of trying to build an app?”

The idea of this discussion is to -

• Help devs learn more about the Indian social sector and the problems they work on - Education, Climate, Health, etc.
• Help them identify and solve problems that lie outside of the tech world
• Help students adopt a problem-solving approach that goes well beyond the gamified system of competitive coding, and building the same projects that everyone else is working on
• Attempt to create a shelf of problems for the FOSS community to work on
• Give a platform to non-profits and civil society to talk about their work and address contributor requirements

Potential Participating organisations [WIP]

• Rainmatter Foundation
• PrathamBooks
• Gooey.AI
• Project Tech4Dev
• Tech4Good Community
• OASIS
• Aikyam Fellows
• Tinkerhub
• and more

[shubhanshi_g]

Title: Myths of Decentralisation: Rethinking the Future of an Open, Private and User-Owned Internet

Key Focus:

1. Understanding decentralisation beyond cryptocurrencies and financial use cases
2. Why internet infrastructure became increasingly centralised and what risks that creates
3. Can we build systems where users own their identity, data, and digital presence?
4. Blockchain as an open coordination and verification layer, not just a payment system
5. How zero-knowledge proofs enable privacy-preserving verification without exposing user data
6. Comparing trust models: central authorities vs distributed networks vs community governance
7. The role of open-source communities in shaping decentralised infrastructure
8. Separating genuine technological potential from hype and misinformation

Brief:

The internet was built on open protocols, but over time much of our digital lives have moved into centralised platforms where a few organisations control infrastructure, data, identity, and access.

This discussion explores whether decentralised technologies can help us build a more open, secure, private, and community-owned internet. Instead of focusing on speculation or financial applications, we will examine the underlying technologies — blockchain networks, zero-knowledge proofs, decentralised identity, and peer-to-peer systems — and how they can address challenges around trust, privacy, censorship resistance, and user control.

The aim for this session will be to challenge common misconceptions around decentralisation and explore where these technologies genuinely add value, where they fall short, and how they can align with the principles of Free and Open Source Software.

Possible Points for Discussion

1. “Blockchain is only useful for speculation” — what are the actual technical primitives?
2. Does decentralisation improve security and resilience, or just add complexity?
3. Can we have privacy and transparency at the same time?
4. How do zero-knowledge proofs allow verification without revealing information?
5. Are decentralised identity systems a better alternative to platform-controlled identities?
6. What happens when a few companies control AI, cloud infrastructure, social networks, and digital identity?
7. How can FOSS communities evaluate decentralised technologies critically without dismissing them entirely?
8. What parts of the internet should remain decentralised, and what parts benefit from centralisation?
9. How do we avoid replacing one form of concentration with another?

Discussion Format

Interactive community discussion in roundtable format: A moderated discussion where attendees can share perspectives, challenge assumptions, and explore decentralised technologies through the lens of open-source values.

An open discussion focused on questions, experiences, concerns, and ideas from participants.

The goal is not to promote a specific technology or ecosystem, but to create a space for the FOSS community to critically examine how decentralised approaches may contribute to a more open and user-controlled internet.

Moderator:

• Shubhanshi (Me)
• Happy to add someone with background in web3 or just experienced with discussion moderation as a co-moderator

[Sree_harsha_Thanneru]

Title:
From Digital Public Infrastructure to People’s Digital Infrastructure: Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures for ensuring Democratic Accountability
Discussion organized by SAFAR Trust and FOSS United

Objective:
To explore how the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community can work alongside social movements, peoples campaigns and networks working with unorganised workers, the poor and the historically marginalised to enhance peoples’ rights to a more just and dignified economic order. While this process entails the necessary constructing and rebuilding of modes which enables political participation of people beyond voting, there is a clear need for such modes and platforms to be complemented by digital infrastructures which are built to serve the goals of transparency towards the people and accountability of the powerful. The discussion aims to introduce the need for such a peoples’ digital infrastructure, and identify opportunities for demonstration of alternatives to move the conversation from conception to practice.

The discussion will explore:

• When and how should digital infrastructures be designed when transparency for and accountability towards the poorest and the most marginalised is the starting point
• What distinguishes a People’s Digital Infrastructure from Digital Public Infrastructure? What are the governing principles of such a Peoples’ Digital Infrastructure?
• India has emerged as a global leader in building Digital Public Infrastructure, while vast numbers of the poor, elderly and the working class suffer exclusion, erasure, opacity and diminishing control over their rights and resources through them. Who were these infrastructures designed by and for what purpose? And who is accountable for the loss of lives, livelihoods and dignity that the imposition of such infrastructures has resulted in?
• How can FOSS communities collaborate with workers’ organisations, RTI campaigns, social audit institutions and citizen groups to co-create digital public goods that decentre power and make the powerful answerable to the people
• What breakthroughs have taken place for such transitions and what practical opportunities exist today—from gig worker rights and public information systems to social audits and participatory urban planning?

Format
Moderated discussion with opening remarks, followed by a moderated conversation.

Potential Participating organisations & Individuals [WIP]

• Representative, SAFAR Trust and Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)
• Representative, FOSS United
• Technologist working on public-interest digital infrastructure
• Representative from a workers’ collective or trade union engaged with platform workers
• MGNREGA workers , Pension beneficiaries , claimants of Forest Rights Act etc
• Front line functionaries : such as NREGA Mates, Anganwadi Workers, Booth Level Officers etc
• RTI Activists
  and More