My 2 Rupees.
- FOSS Hack really is an online event. Submissions, uploads, live updates, project showcase, presentation video, evaluation, all happen online.
- Last year, local groups organised physical venues for people to congregate and participate in a couple of cities, just to hang out together. I’d gone to the one that was organised in RV college Bangalore. It was fun. Participants from different places got together and worked on their own respective projects. There were mentors going around helping them and there was food. The org had taken the lead in this and sponsored catering, but it very well could have been a group of interested folks at RV itself (there were some great volunteers there who helped run the whole thing).
This format, decentralised local group/chapter run off-line congregations seems to be win-win? There doesn’t need to be an “official” venue run by the org itself. Anyone can organise a FOSS Hack meet-up anywhere. Maybe multiple colleges in the same city if there is interest. Actual participation in the hackathon is all online anyway. The org itself runs no offline congregation.
Then the question of when to run FOSS Hack and IndiaFOSS, two months apart or six months apart, becomes easier and can be weighed more in terms of benefits for the community and participants than organisational headaches.
Does this make sense?