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

[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