[RFC] FOSS Hack 2025 and Season of Commits

Hackathon
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FOSS Hack 2025

Event Date: February 22-23
Mode: Hybrid (Online and multiple in-person locations)
Number of Partners: 10 (refer to the tentative partners’ list below)

Season of Commits

This is an introductory edition, details here.
It’s an 8-week online program designed for Indian students to contribute to Indian free and open-source projects under mentorship.

Date: May 15 - July 15 2025
Total Number of Projects: 10 (refer to the tentative partners’ list below)
Total Number of Students: 80-100
Mentors: 1-3 per project
Stipend:

  • Participants: ₹5,000-10,000, based on performance.
  • Mentors: ₹10,000-15,000, based on performance.

Tentative Project List

(Community projects only, mostly previous FOSS Hack partners)

  1. Amaze File Manager
  2. Vyakaran
  3. Frappe
  4. Internet Shutdown
  5. Listmonk
  6. Rethink DNS
  7. Circuit Verse
  8. Keyshade
  9. Kitty
  10. FOSS United Platform

We are open to include Indian commercial FOSS projects if they can contribute financially (open for suggestions). This support would help the FOSS United Foundation reduce the program’s overall costs, potentially around ₹2,00,000.

These two events are strategically scheduled for sustainability; FOSS Hack serves as an introduction to the partner projects. The 2.5-month gap between FOSS Hack and the Season of Commits provides students with ample time to learn more about the projects and prepare their statements of purpose on how they can contribute.

FOSS Hack continues its mission to encourage both students and professional developers to develop and contribute to free and open-source software. This year, FOSS Hack’s partner projects will also connect to the new program, Season of Commits, facilitating deeper contributions and engagements.

Budget

  • FOSS Hack Prize Pool: ₹500,000
  • FOSS Hack Hosting Costs: ₹500,000
  • Season of Commits Stipends (Participants): ~₹700,000
  • Season of Commits Stipends (Mentors): ~₹300,000
  • Total: ₹20,00,000

We request the community to share their comments before 15th of Dec. It will help us start planning these programs accordingly.

Links to the previous FOSS Hackathon:

  1. FOSS Hack 2024
  2. FOSS Hack 3.0 - Hack Online and Offline and win up to ₹10 Lakh cash prize
  3. FOSS Hack 2021 - Online hackathon on 13th & 14th Nov - FOSS United
  4. FOSS Hack 2020 - Online hackathon on 12 Sep - FOSS United
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Hi Vishal,

Season of Commits definitely sounds a wonderful initiative.
I am currently maintaining API Dash which is a FOSS API client and was one of the winning projects in FOSS Hack 3.0.
We have grown the project over time and built a community around it.
The project also participated in Google Summer of Code 2024.
We have guided a lot of students into making their first meaningful open source contribution and would love to participate in Season of Commits next year.

Can you kindly let me know how we can apply as a partner project.

Regards,
Ashita

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Thank you @ashita, for expressing interest in becoming a project partner for Season of Commits. We will soon open applications for partner projects.

For reference, the above list includes projects from the previous FOSS Hack. We welcome new partners through our upcoming application process.

Please stay tuned to this forum for updates.

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Season of Commits sounds good.

Re. FOSS Hack, one idea is to have a period before the hackathon where participants submit their thoughts, reasons and motivations behind what they’re planning to build, and having a group of mentors help them polish their ideas, or brainstorm new ones. This should help with the issue of abandoning and poor quality of projects.

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Thank you for your reply @fossdot!
Would definitely stay tuned for the call for partner projects.

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If we decide to go with this, I can volunteer to put together the mentors group and be one of the mentors. Do share your thoughts. One thing I don’t have clarity on is: would the mentors be the judges as well or would there be a separate judges group. I guess the latter.

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I am very sure, there is a seperate group of judges and mentors. Someone correct if I’m wrong.

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Yep, there was a separate group, but my doubt is if they still would be separate if we go ahead with this idea. I was thinking since mentors would already have all the context about the participants, why not make them the judges too (but not sure since there’s judging for Season of Commits too).

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Judges are typically a group of people invited from the community (mostly active volunteers and industry partners/sponsors etc.). Mentors are usually selected through an application process - pretty much anyone who wants to mentor students can be a part of this group. While both the groups are typically exclusive, judges are also free to mentor students if they’d like.

Do note that while we did have mentors for FOSSHack 2024, there wasn’t a lot of activity in the mentoring channels/calls than usual. I’m guessing this is because participants prefer to use chatGPT now :sweat_smile:

This year, maintainers/contributors of the partner projects will also be mentoring students who wish to contribute to those specific projects.

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Mentors are usually selected through an application process - pretty much anyone who wants to mentor students can be a part of this group.

Let’s only accept mentors who have built a FOSS library/tool/product?

Do note that while we did have mentors for FOSSHack 2024, there wasn’t a lot of activity in the mentoring channels/calls than usual. I’m guessing this is because participants prefer to use chatGPT now

I think it’s because (1) there wasn’t really an incentive for participants to collaborate with mentors and/or (2) there weren’t enough capable mentors and/or (3) there was no process for “participants to submit their thoughts, reasons and motivations behind what they’re planning to build, and having a group of mentors help them polish their ideas, or brainstorm new one”.

This year, maintainers/contributors of the partner projects will also be mentoring students who wish to contribute to those specific projects.

Cool.

both the groups are typically exclusive

Cool.

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:100: (2)/(3) agreed with this. Not “anyone” should be allowed to be a mentor I feel. Moreover, having selective mentors is helpful because if the mentor himself is experienced they can deeply explain details with better technicality. Virtual mentorship is already a big problem.

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(2)/(3) agreed with this

Not (1) :D? By (1), I meant generally most people see hackathons as a quick, fun way to just build something and make some quick money, so who would want to collaborate with mentors to make something actually useful/fun/different/long-lasting. Today I saw a post about someone winning a $9000 hackathon prize and it was mind-blowing to think that even that project is going to get abandoned like most hackathon projects.

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Could be a reason.

I’ll share my experience. We were building a screenshot tool which would have built-in imagemagick stuff which I use in my system to create a macOS like Screenshot (replication of Cleanshot X), but I myself had a lot of problems. Issue was that there were people knowing python around me, but most of them came from Windows and MacOS hence they ended up knowing nothing about GTK.

Incentivization part – I don’t know much about it, that might somewhere be useful (?)

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Sorry, yes. Mentors are still required to have at least some experience contributing to/building FOSS.

I didn’t mention it explicitly because last year no one really applied for mentoring :grimacing: . We reached out to people (who were anyway active FOSS contributors) from our end so that wasn’t really a filter.

I think it’s because (1) there wasn’t really an incentive for participants to collaborate with mentors and/or (2) there weren’t enough capable mentors and/or (3) there was no process for “participants to submit their thoughts, reasons and motivations behind what they’re planning to build, and having a group of mentors help them polish their ideas, or brainstorm new one”.

Agreed, the mentorship program was pretty much last minute. Happy to see you’re interested in volunteering for this and looking forward to improving this!

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Some thoughts on importance of long-term program with the partner’s project rather than just for FOSS Hack.

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Just realised that having a one or two week period isn’t going to make much of a difference. This was “treating the symptoms, not the cause”.

I think there should just be an active community of people who are willing to help others who are looking for help (brainstorming, technical stuff, advice). I think there are amazing people in our community who are willing to help, but not sure if they’ve made it clear that they’re available to help. About the people looking for help, I wish to see a lot more new product, library, tool, etc., discussions in our community, which are less right now due to various reasons. Making the people willing to help more accessible could be one solution.

Ideally there should be no FOSS Hack – people should just build stuff whenever they want, get the help from others, and we could give mini grants and major grants.The grant winners would be showcased on our socials. Majority (if not all) of the best and still running projects from the previous FOSS Hacks were started before FOSS Hack began.

The other thing I don’t understand is how we give a 20K grant to Project Segfault but a 50k/100k FOSS Hack prize to some project which was built in a day or two and is going to be abandoned. Also, these days building something in a day or two is easy. We could still do live-coding events for fun, but I don’t think they would help much in creating more FOSS projects from India. My suggestion in the previous para would be better I think. Do share your thoughts on that.

And as I mentioned before, I’m willing to mentor/help in whatever way possible from my learnings and experiences. Feel free to reach out.

Season of Commits is great – looking forward to seeing how it goes!

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So, the idea is similar to tinkerspace? A place to tinker or build software whenever they have the drive or motivation to?

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The idea is just what I described in my third para. Tinkerspaces are nice and fun, but not necessary for building stuff, getting help from others, awarding grants and showcasing.

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If the goal is to make full-fledged projects come out of FOSSHack, perhaps not so much. But if the aim is to just help out students figure out how to go about creating a project, improving UX or just achieving whatever they set out to create we can do wonders. These things can’t lead to instant results, I think we should help them where we can and let Butterfly effect come into play :slight_smile:

Ideally there should be no FOSS Hack – people should just build stuff whenever they want, get the help from others, and we could give mini grants and major grants.The grant winners would be showcased on our socials. Majority (if not all) of the best and still running projects from the previous FOSS Hacks were started before FOSS Hack began.

There will always be people who are new to FOSS, the hackathon serves as an avenue for them to just explore this domain. Just “building stuff” is harder than it sounds because of how broken the software engineering system in academia is, and a hackathon is one of the only ways to engage students and motivate them to create projects. The primary goal of the hackathon is to spread awareness about FOSS in my opinion, getting really good projects each year is a long term goal (which is why FOSSHack participants get the option to work on these projects full time and later apply for a grant).

The other thing I don’t understand is how we give a 20K grant to Project Segfault but a 50k/100k FOSS Hack prize to some project which was built in a day or two and is going to be abandoned. Also, these days building something in a day or two is easy. We could still do live-coding events for fun, but I don’t think they would help much in creating more FOSS projects from India. My suggestion in the previous para would be better I think. Do share your thoughts on that.

I don’t think we should compare these programs. The grants initiative is for projects to be able to sustain themselves without any financial restrictions and most times the grant amounts are what the project themselves requested ( there are have been a good number of grants where the amount is more than the entire FOSSHack prize pool). I agree that most good Indian FOSS projects will get written outside of FOSSHack, but reaching people who have no idea about the philosophy is a harder challenge that FOSSHack seems to solve to some extent. I’m pretty sure Raven would have existed regardless of if the team participated in FOSSHack or not, but maybe there was some aspect of FOSSHack that motivated them to work on it.

We can’t let go of FOSSHack just because the odds of getting good quality and unabandoned projects are low, the grants program and FOSSHack can co-exist

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If the goal is to make full-fledged projects come out of FOSSHack, perhaps not so much.

They don’t need to be full-fledged, but at least something actually useful/fun/different/long-lasting. Most of the winning projects from the past years aren’t. When we give the first prize of 100K to a project which was built in a day or two, not really useful/fun/different/long-lasting and is going to be abandoned, we’re setting a bad standard.

But if the aim is to just help out students figure out how to go about creating a project, improving UX or just achieving whatever they set out to create we can do wonders.

I thought FOSS Hack’s aim is to “bring together students and professionals to build or extend FOSS projects”, not to help out students with all that?

I think we should help them where we can and let Butterfly effect come into play :slight_smile:

Of course we can help them (that’s why I said we could do something about making people willing to help more accessible), but truly motivated people don’t need FOSS Hack to build something.

There will always be people who are new to FOSS, the hackathon serves as an avenue for them to just explore this domain.
The primary goal of the hackathon is to spread awareness about FOSS in my opinion
reaching people who have no idea about the philosophy is a harder challenge that FOSSHack seems to solve to some extent.

From what I’ve seen, it’s like a regular hackathon where people come and build things, and putting the code on GitHub is the major difference. Does FOSS Hack really help with all what you’ve described? I understand that Season of Commits helps with all that.

Just “building stuff” is harder than it sounds because of how broken the software engineering system in academia is, and a hackathon is one of the only ways to engage students and motivate them to create projects.

Motivated students don’t need FOSS Hack to build something. And, AI has made building stuff a lot easier. And, we could just have fun group live-coding meetups or something in tinkerspaces/localhosts if they want to build stuff together. No need of an elaborate national open source hackathon for that.

there are have been a good number of grants where the amount is more than the entire FOSSHack prize pool

Yep, and that’s great, and I’m saying that we should push for mini-grants and major-grants instead of FOSS Hack prizes.

I’m pretty sure Raven would have existed regardless of if the team participated in FOSSHack or not, but maybe there was some aspect of FOSSHack that motivated them to work on it.

Yep, Raven began before FOSS Hack, and so they would have obviously existed even if there was no FOSS Hack. And, if the money was the motivation, they could have gotten that through a mini/major grant.