We just finished (more or less) finalizing the IndiaFOSS 2026 programme. 8 devrooms did their thing. The PC (@James_Reilly @rahulporuri and me) with some inputs from IF team(including staff) did the main track, with help from a lot of reviewers. The booth list is also out. We’re sitting at around 2400 registrations right now! Checkout the schedule to see what IndiaFOSS 2026 looks like.
Now generally, I’d analyze the program after the conference, but this time I thought - let’s do it now. In the past, this would have been a labour by itself, but now with AI I tried to categorize, summarise stuff and create an overall picture. Analyze a program just by processing session descriptions is probably good enough for an approximate analysis.
We have a dialled up the number of devrooms this year to 8 from 6 last year. Without the devrooms, IndiaFOSS would look have mostly upper layer (web, apps, etc) talks (oversimpifying a bit). With the devrooms, we are way more wholesome in our programme. I’d like to call out all the efforts put in by the devroom teams. Tagging all the proposing managers here : @Ashutosh_Pandey @amit_pundir @Balu_B @hritik @srihari_thyagarajan @Jeswin @skysingh04 @sahaj_sarup This information is public, but most people don’t “get it” - devrooms make up more than half the conference CFPs. In fact, Cloud & DevOps and Security each got about half as many talk proposals as the main track… Devrooms are also the reason we are able to give dedicated space to topics such as Documentation, and Design.
And then we have 70+ booths. And that is something. So many creators in one place! This will be my third IndiaFOSS, and I hadn’t really cracked the answer to one question - what makes IndiaFOSS as vibrant as it is? What explains this ? Found a partial answer only while attempting an analysis… which is that we have a high “creator” to attendee ratio. Even if we consider just speakers and booths as “creators”, we’d sit at a ratio of around 1:8 to 1:10, which is phenomenal. Hat tip to booth curators @ansh and team, and to the entire community which showed up!
Overall we have 130 sessions, and a very interesting speaker demographic - including 23% students… A lot of our content covers community, social sector relevance of FOSS, and some of these things are well captured in the report. It also identifies some gaps that we need to fix.
Here is the entire report, with clear disclaimers on top: indiafoss-2026/programme-analysis/if2026-summary.pdf at main · shreekumar3d/indiafoss-2026 · GitHub
DISCLAIMER: Note that this is entirely my voluntary effort, and is not endorsed or reviewed by the IndiaFOSS PC/FOSS United Foundation in any way… and neither does it use any private info that is available to me due to platform access.
We’re doing one more thing this year to amp up community participation : Communi-Con. Last year we had a 1 hour slot for flash talks. Somebody could just show up and talk. Now, that will happen via voting - limited to attendees. Anybody can propose talks. The best 7 get our biggest stage… Check it out - Communi-Con. CFP for this opens on 25th Sep - Day 0!
I also thought about how we can improve the conference. Again, this is something we talk about at the end of the conference - maybe in the feedback session 
But it’s good to have more data to enable people to think about it, form opinions, etc… The programme analysis has some useful cues, but what beyond that ?
If anything, COVID has taught us the importance of in-person learning… Overall, if we dial up the number of hands on workshops, that should be useful content - and we have the people who can make this happen already with us - devrooms, and booths!
We should also have more project BoFs I guess - nobody is using BoFs as informal project get togethers – which is quite a norm in other conferences. We should fix this. And we probably could do with at-least a few more devrooms. Very large projects (Frappe?) are probably good devroom candidates too. And we surely need many more FOSS communities involved in IndiaFOSS in some way.
Of course to do all this, we need a larger venue for IndiaFOSS 2027. How big ? Answers to this and other things in this other report, “Improvement Plan” : indiafoss-2026/programme-analysis/if2027-improvement-plan.pdf at main · shreekumar3d/indiafoss-2026 · GitHub
I spent many hours reading the analysis and tuning it, but much less on the improvement plan. That’s because I feel that all said and done, it’s a community effort. Have ideas ?