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 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.
Okay, I’ll bite first since nobody has responded
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.
