Quarterly Report - Q2 2025

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TL; DR

  • The elections for the FOSS United Governing Board were concluded, and we announced the inaugural Governing Board members. We held monthly meetings with the Governing Board in May and June
  • The Foundation is focusing on IndiaFOSS 2025. The Call for Proposals closed a few weeks back, and with help from 10+ reviewers, we are combing through the proposals. The devroom proposals status should be public next week!
  • We announced the results of FOSS Hack 2025. The participants created a number of interesting projects, but sadly, our judges also reported a large number of GenAI-generated projects, and we are working on revamping FOSS Hack next year
  • We participated in the Maintainer Month campaign by GitHub during May 2025 by highlighting 30 Indian FOSS maintainers and projects. Based on positive reception from the FOSS United Community, we extended the program into a round-the-year Forklore campaign
  • We revamped the FOSS Clubs program for the Academic Year 2025-2026, and we are now seeking colleges and students to start (or restart) FOSS Clubs on college campuses

Community & Foundation

Governing Board

  • FOSS United elected our inaugural Governing Board, made up entirely of members of the FOSS United Community. Please find brief information about the Governing Board members at - Meet the first-ever elected Governing Board @FOSS United
  • If you have any comments or questions regarding the election process, please comment on the forum post - Feedback on the election process
  • In the May and June 2025 Governing Board meetings, we discussed the role of the Governing Board (GB here on) and the Foundation going forward, what the Foundation expects from the GB, and what the GB can expect from the Foundation
  • One of the priorities on our hands is to finish the Governing Board Charter
  • Another priority is to put together an [RFC] Invited Talks Policy, Guidelines and Procedure. Please comment on the RFC via the forum with your thoughts about the policy
  • We are happy to report that almost all of the GB members are actively engaging with the FOSS United Community, as volunteers with city chapters or in IndiaFOSS 2025
  • In the June 2025 GB meeting, we discussed ways to improve transparency and establish accountability practices for the Foundation, including but not limited to
    • A routine quarterly report publication to report on the Foundation’s activities. Starting with Q2 2025 report
    • Improved and consistent reporting with annual reports, and proper archiving on the Foundation’s website. The FY 2024-2025 report should be ready by end of July
    • A public archive of audited financial statements on the Foundation’s website

IndiaFOSS

  • Planning for IndiaFOSS 2025 started earlier than usual, with the first volunteer sync happening in January 2025
  • The Call for Proposals for IndiaFOSS 2025 opened mid-March 2025, and we promoted the CFP during March, April, and May 2025. The CFP closed on 15 June 2025, after receiving close to 350 proposals, roughly 100 more than the previous year
  • More than 15 devrooms were proposed for IndiaFOSS 2025, out of which six were accepted . Please see RFC for devrooms by Nemo in Q1 2025, which started us down this path!
  • Of the roughly 350 proposals, almost 140 were submitted to the devrooms!
  • We have more than 10 reviewers from the Community helping us review IndiaFOSS 2025 proposals, while also coordinating with Devroom managers who are handling their reviews. We will share information about the reviewers after the review process is complete
  • Almost a thousand tickets have been sold for IndiaFOSS 2025, 12 of which are the “Contributor Tickets”. We have an ambitious target of 2500 audience members in-person for IndiaFOSS this year
  • Zerodha rejoined us as an Industry Partner for FY 2025-2026, leading to Frappe, Zerodha, Samagata Foundation, Sensibull, and The Commit Company being recognized as IndiaFOSS 2025 sponsors, thanks to their long-term support via the Industry Partnership program
  • In addition, we are happy to announce that Bruno, Plane as IndiaFOSS 2025 sponsors, and we are happy to have Project Tech4Dev back as a sponsor
  • We have talked to more than 15 organizations during Q2 2025 regarding potential sponsorship opportunities, and we are awaiting a few confirmations. We have reached out to more than 25 organizations via emails, and text messages. Based on organizations that have expressed serious interest so far, we should be able to meet the 20 Lakh INR target we had set for ourselves
  • The Diversity Scholarships initiative at IndiaFOSS 2024 had a significant impact, and we are happy to kick it off with a bang this year. An unnamed donor organization that donated 1.5 Lakh INR last year is coming back this year to donate 2.5 Lakh INR, and they have also committed to funding this initiative for three years, including 2025. We are working through the necessary paperwork here
  • We have received more than 50 applications for Booths at IndiaFOSS 2025 - from projects, to communities, and more!
  • Please find notes about the volunteer meetings at [Planning] IndiaFOSS 2025 - Celebrating 5 years of IndiaFOSS! - #13 by Siddharth_Shivkumar
  • Nemo also proposed that we organize a Maintainer Summit as an IndiaFOSS pre-event, taking inspiration from a similar event that happened at Kubecon EU 2025. The event is happening on 19 September 2025, Friday, and if you are a FOSS maintainer or Creator in India, RSVP at Maintainer Summit 2025. See [Proposal] Maintainer Summit @ IndiaFOSS for the discussion
  • We are also working on a revamp of indiafoss.net. indiafoss.net is the first Google hit for the “foss india” search phrase, and we still receive a significant amount of traffic to indiafoss.net. We are currently exploring new designs for the website, and we intend to launch the revamped site before IndiaFOSS 2025

FOSS Hack

  • We had a small hiccup when evaluating FOSS Hack 2025 submissions, but we handled the hiccup and announced the results of FOSS Hack 2025 in two “batches”
  • More than 5000 people participated, as more than 2500 teams, which submitted roughly 800 projects in the end. While the number is larger than last year, our judges pointed out that there were a significant number of GenAI-generated projects this year
  • It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that submissions still get eliminated in the first round because they lack one or more of the basic requirements of a FOSS Hack submission - a FOSS License, a README, a demo video. We attempted to work with The Second Design before FOSS Hack 2025 to address some of these root problems but we have a long way to go
  • We are working on revamping FOSS Hack 2026, to ensure that the hackathon is able to meaningfully improve participation in the FOSS ecosystem. We are considering changing the hackathon duration from a weekend to a month, and we hope to restrict College Localhosts to existing FOSS Clubs. We will be putting out an RFC with this revamp in Q3 2025 for comments
  • We sincerely thank Jahnvi Patil from The Commit Company, Rohan Verma from Zerodha, Hemanth Mangla from Namma Yatri, and Hussain Nagaria from Frappe for their work as the FOSS Hack 2025 Jury!
  • Most of the FOSS Hack prize money payouts are completed, and we are following up with the few remaining winners to finish the payouts
  • We asked a few projects to consider participating in IndiaFOSS 2025, either as a project showcase booth or by submitting a talk proposal

Grants

  • We announced two new grants to Malhar and Contrapunctus
  • In addition to these two projects, we continue to support Circuitverse and Rethink DNS
  • We supported a very small grant (Rs. 3111) to Prof. Sreekanth @ NITC to organize a short-term training program on Linux, Libre, and LaTeX in Education
  • We supported a FOSS Meetup at Kasaragod, Kerala via a small Rs. 3000 grant. Please find the post-event report at Post-Event Report: FOSS Meetup 2025 – Kasaragod
  • We received a grant request from a US-based non-profit organization. We rejected their request and pointed them towards the FLOSS/fund. They have a growing userbase in India and we invited them to participate in the Community/IndiaFOSS
  • FOSS United is an Ecosystem Partner for the FLOSS/fund by Zerodha. Some of the projects that we reached out to during Q1 2025 were announced as recipients of the inaugural tranche of 325,000 USD. We also worked with multiple journals and YouTubers like Surveillance Report, Savvynik to promote the fund. If you are familiar with any “critical, impactful, and valuable FLOSS projects globally“, put us in touch with them, and we can help them understand the FLOSS/fund
  • We are also in the process of becoming an Ecosystem Partner for the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund. Please see the FAQ to understand if you are a good fit for the Fund, and reach out to us if you would like to have a conversation about it
  • FOSS United endorsed the Open Source Pledge. Please read more on our blogpost

Events

Check out the full list of events during Q2 2025 at FOSS Events Timeline. Mumbai, Pune, and Lucknow organized CityFOSS conferences during Q2 2025

In addition, we are working with Prof. Arul & team at NLSIU, Bengaluru and Venkatesh Hariharan to organize a report launch event for the FOSS in India study. The event is being organized at IIIT Delhi on July 11, 2025.

Season of Commits (Experimental)

  • Gagandeep Singh, creator of PyDataStructs, reached out to us wondering if we could support the Open Science Labs Summer of Code Fellowship. After a brief conversation, we convinced Gagandeep to participate in Season of Commits instead! Prerak is the only participant in the inaugural Season of Commits
  • We discussed Season of Commits at the June 2025 GB meeting, including discussions related to how many times an individual can participate in the Season of Commits (as a committer), what the criteria for projects and participants are, what the quantum of financial support should be, etc. We are consolidating prior art from GSoC and Outreachy to put together guidelines for future Season of Commits

FOSS in Education (Experimental)

  • The “Software Development using Open Source” course at IIIT Delhi wrapped up in April 2024. The two teams who worked on improving performance and web accessibility of fossunited.org - FOSS and Software Engg education and Prof. Pankaj Jalote were happy with the overall experience
  • While we’re happy with the results this time, we can significantly improve this program if we want to repeat it or expand it to other courses/colleges
  • The AI & ML department at the Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune invited me to deliver a session on FOSS & AI as part of their week-long Faculty Development Program. The HoD and the faculty were happy with the session, and were eager to continue participating in the FOSS United Community, for example by continuing to support the FOSS Club at SIT, Pune
  • We organized a 3-day workshop on Git & GitHub at the NavGurukul Kishanganj Campus. This is part of a long-term initiative to enable the students at NavGurukul campuses across the country to get hands-on experience with FOSS tools

Forklore (Experimental)

  • For many months now, we have been considering working on a social media campaign to highlight Indian FOSS projects. The idea came from a simple question - how many Indian FOSS projects can you name? 5? 10? 20? Because people are unable to recall Indian FOSS projects and creators off the top of their head, they have a false belief that there isn’t a lot of FOSS work happening in India. While we believe that we could be doing a lot more, we believed that there was a need to highlight the FOSS work already happening in India
  • Additionally, we believe that students need better role models. There are a lot of “influencers” commenting about the FOSS ecosystem, who end up impacting the view that students have of the FOSS ecosystem. We believe that better role models for the students might help them better understand the FOSS ecosystem. This is the reason behind Forklore being Maintainer-centered instead of being Project-centered
  • Two popular listicles already exist that highlight Indian FOSS projects and creators, but these listicles haven’t received updates recently. We could contribute to these listicles but we chose to start a new listicle instead
  • In April 2025, we learnt about the Maintainer Month campaign by GitHub, and decided to jump onboard this campaign to start a #MaintainerMay campaign
  • We put together a few questions that shed light on the projects but also on the individuals, and we shared this information via our social media channels. Please see the project and maintainers we highlighted at Meet the Maintainers | 31 Days, 31 FOSS Maintainers from India
  • We wanted to make this information accessible via a website, so we worked on https://forklore.in. And based on the feedback we received from the Community via social media during May, we decided to extend Forklore into a year-round campaign. We will continue highlighting maintainers and projects via social media posts on Friday, as part of a new #ForkloreFriday campaign

Community Health (Experimental)

Tech

Staffing

Staffing updates at the Foundation are available at FOSS United Foundation staffing updates

Tech Policy

Miscellaneous

Call to Action for Q3 2025

IndiaFOSS

FOSS Clubs

  • If you are a student or a faculty member interested in starting (or restarting) a FOSS Club in your college, please consider participating in the FOSS United FOSS Clubs program. Checkout more information and apply to be a part of the program at FOSS Clubs
  • If you are a faculty member interested in integrating FOSS into your course curriculum, please reach out to us at foundation at fossunited dot org. We would be happy to help you understand how to integrate FOSS into your course or college curriculum, and help you understand how it will help the students

Forklore

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