Birds of a Feather sessions (or BoFs) at IndiaFOSS 2025 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 etc.
Guidelines
Duration: Each BoF Session will last for 60 mins.
Proposals: Propose a BoF session in this forum thread.
Deadline: The deadline for BoF proposals is June July 7th,2025.
The proposer will serve as the moderator and initiate 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 theinteractive nature of the BoF.
Please see the BoF proposals thread from last year to see the type of submissions we get and accepted BoFs.
I’d like to propose a BoF on the challenges of measuring, visualising, and reporting open source project and community health in the context of different ecosystems leveraging & contributing to OSS (research, academic, commercial, non-profit, governmental, etc.). One of the things we want to do at CHAOSS Asia is to document and collate these challenges (region-wise) in the form of a report against this GitHub repo along with interested participants from the discussion & use it to inform discussions around our metrics and metric models in an Asian context.
Beyond the Bot: Licensing and Policy Gaps in India’s AI Mental Health Landscape
Key Focus : To explore how we can build culturally grounded, ethically licensed, and publicly accountable AI mental health tools in India, especially through open source approaches, rather than relying on closed systems created elsewhere.
Brief : AI mental health tools are everywhere these days: therapy chatbots, mood trackers, even stress prediction apps. But most of these tools are closed-source, designed in English, and built by companies in the Global North. In India, where mental health services are already stretched thin, we risk importing these “solutions” without questioning how well they fit our context or whether they’re transparent, safe, or inclusive.
This BoF is an open conversation for developers, policy thinkers, and FOSS contributors to reflect on what it would mean to create open, multilingual, privacy-respecting AI tools for mental health in India. We’ll also talk about what kind of licensing models would protect such tools from misuse, especially when they’re adopted by governments, NGOs, or startups.
We’ll briefly touch on policies like the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), which has been shaping digital health infrastructure in India, and think about how AI mental health tools fit (or don’t fit) into that vision. The goal isn’t to critique a specific policy, but to think about what’s missing and how the FOSS community can help fill those gaps.
Discussion prompts
What could culturally sensitive, open-source AI mental health tools for India actually look like?
How do we license these tools to ensure they remain open, safe, and non-exploitative?
What are the risks when closed, proprietary AI tools are used in mental health care, especially in public systems?
Are India’s current digital health policies supporting or ignoring the potential of FOSS-aligned AI?
Can we imagine new norms around AI licensing and transparency that start from values of care, not just code?
Preferred format : Roundtable.
Happy to moderate the session.
Title: Challenges in building a diverse, equal, inclusive and accessible FOSS ecosystem
Technological landscape has always been battling issues with DEIA, and FOSS ecosystem is no exception to it. This session aims to discuss the challenges encountered in FOSS ecosystem regarding the same, with discussions regarding status of current free and open-source solutions for improvement of accessibility, raising awareness regarding FOSS to underrepresented communities, and initiatives for ensuring diversity and inclusivity and aspects of improvements, serving as a checkpoint for anyone involved in technology and FOSS to understand and improve engagement and community health in FOSS ecosystem.
The course consists of two parts - roughly split between generic public policy concepts, and a “specialization” part, which in this case is the “Technology and Policy” aspect. GCPP encourages and incentivizes folks to engage policy makers in many ways - ranging from writing, podcasts, videos, and getting folks to interact with a wide range of people involved in policies. Beyond this, various Takshashila networks and events are a good platform to continue the journey beyond just the course.
While FOSS United famously doesn’t expect anything back from the scholars, it would be good to understand what the outcomes of this have been, seen from the perspective of the various participants.
Discussion prompts:
This is structured as a Birds of a Feather session to allow for a free form exchange of views. GCPP scholars can share their public policy journey, their learning, anecdotes, what worked, what could be improved and any thoughts about the future. GCPP faculty may also share their views on the impact of the scholarship.
Discussion Format: round table, with participants sharing their thoughts. Onlookers (see below) may pose questions too.
Other benefits: This BOF session is likely to be useful for curious onlookers as well as people seriously considering doing this course at some point in time.
Note: Scanning through the list of scholars, I can see that more than ten of the past GCPP scholars will be attending IndiaFOSS 2025. For better awareness and participation, we could pull out the list of all scholars and let them know this is happening.
Sanket here.
I have received GCPP scholarship from FOSS United and was part of May - July 2023 cohort scholarships. I would love to be part of this session.
Since then, I have part of NAST Fellowship from Taskhashila and would lie to share my journey of adventures in tech policy.
Key Focus: The philosophy of ‘Free and Open Source’ has not remained restricted to computer software alone. It has proved its relevance to other fields too, including in the sciences, art, journalism, law, social media, among others. In this context, the present talks about his experiences in applying “Free and Open Source” to real life, focussing on both its potential and pitfalls.
The Speaker: FN is a Goa-based journalist, who, while a non-techie, has been a supporter of FOSS, since the late 1990s. He has also written widely on this subject. In this BoF session, he proposes to explain his experiences with the BytesForAll experiment, among others. BytesForAll was a simple mailing list, active between 1999 and circa 2007. At its peak it had 15 key supporters from six South Asian countries. It was co-founded by Noronha (India) and Partha P Sarkar (Bangladesh). It had a mailing list of approx 1500, and played a crucial role at amplifying ideas about how IT and the Internet could be used in social development. It leaves lessons behind from what can be leant from the FOSS world, and how ideas from technology can be used for social development. Beyond this, the session will also focus on more contemporary experiments in creating low-cost, sustainable and long-term alternative media by applying FOSS concepts to communications and cyberspace.
Title: Building AI Agents from Scratch: From Prompt to Autonomy in Open Source
Key Focus:
Understanding the architecture of AI agents
Leveraging open-source tools like LangChain, Ollama, and local LLMs
Step-by-step demo on building a personalized autonomous AI agent
Real-world use cases: productivity, automation, and developer tooling
Brief:
In this session, we’ll go beyond ChatGPT prompts and into the world of AI agents systems that can reason, remember, and take actions autonomously. We’ll explore how to build powerful agents using open-source tools like LangChain and Ollama, even on local machines. Whether you’re a developer curious about the internals of tools like AutoGPT, or someone eager to build your own AI sidekick, this talk will give you the roadmap, code, and inspiration to get started. No GPU or cloud needed just open-source power.
Foundational Understanding: Gain a comprehensive overview of the Nix trinity—the language, operating system, and package manager—and how they work together to create a unified ecosystem.
Essential Tooling: Explore fundamental tools including search.nixos.org for package discovery, Flakes for project management, development shells for consistent environments, and other key utilities that make Nix productive.
Community Contribution: Understand how the broader community contributes to Nix, including pathways for newcomers to get involved and make meaningful contributions to the ecosystem.
Practical Demonstration: See real-world examples comparing imperative versus declarative approaches, highlighting how declarative methods eliminate wasted time and effort while increasing productivity and reducing work duplication.
Brief:
The Nix community desperately needs both new users and power users who, when they can’t install and set up a tool they want to deploy, will step forward to write the required Nix derivation and get it merged into the nixpkgs repository. This benefits newcomers and the entire community, making everyone’s life easier.
