[RFC] On FOSS United project grants

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Context

I had a lot of discussion recently with people from the FOSS United community about their vision for the organisation, the direction that it’s on and their general feedback on what we’re doing right now.

In my opinion the broader vision of the community is to build a ecosystem for FOSS projects, maintainers, contributors that acts as a bridge between organisations, government and academia.

I personally find it upsetting that we have paused funding for projects quoting the likelihood of them being able to get VC funds, while we continue to -

  • Sponsor events (that may or may not be 100% FOSS related) that don’t require grants as they have other sponsors.
  • Hire like crazy, for verticals that are not immediate requirements.
  • Establishing new city chapters without making sure if there is a need for a FOSS community in those regions.

These are all very important programs and verticals to effectively scale up the organisation (most of these also may not cost a lot, but expenses add up) , but I don’t want these to be done at the cost of open source projects still unable to become sustainable. Not all VC funding is bad,but not everyone wants/needs VC funding either.

from fossunited.org -

The foundation, currently in its infancy, aims to provide grassroots support to FOSS projects and events, and evolve into a community-industry collaboration with a diverse group of members and patrons.

This “support” to projects has so far been primarily given through

  • Grants
  • Visibility (Showcasing projects at events, through media and other content)

With the project grants program now paused, we have become and organisation that does just/mostly events. ( and I don’t see this changing anytime soon, with more programs planned that will only increase costst)

While we have been successful in promoting and giving enough eyeballs to open source projects ( case in point - Bruno), I’m not sure how much support FOSS projects have been able to get from us in terms of contributions/contributors and/or funding.

With more than 60% of our funding coming in through only two organizations, there will always be reasonable constraints on what we can and can’t support. But if the finances and resources are being a hurdle to support projects, we need to think of alternative solutions.

I have a proposal that I’d like to know the community’s thoughts on -

If we know of enough VCs, Organisations and Individuals who are interested in investing in FOSS projects and also mostly agree that not all VC funding is bad, it might be a good idea to bring along these entities together and make an ecosystem for maintainers to be able to find the right investors, be easily able to pitch to them, ensure a certain set of guidelines in place and raise investments.

I’m thinking something like YC for FOSS projects in India. Some amount of support can be provided through our umbrella (and/or Zerodha/Frappe) as just grants, others through partners that we onboard specifically for this program that will make equity investments in these projects. ( Is CSR possible too? Or something like open collective?)

We can create a platform for FOSS developers to pitch their product to multiple interested people at the same time, utilise our immense network of FOSSpreneurs to mentor them on possible pathways, maybe even create content ( see startupschool.org) for FOSS startups specifically.

Funding projects should be our priority, but if we are short of funds to continue doing this, we should at least create some sort of a system that helps projects get funds, equity free or not)

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This makes so much sense, also by this do you mean that we started supporting meetups in multiple cities just for the sake of doing that ?

This is certainly a very good idea and maybe we can think of working on something like this in the future.

While sharing about what we do in a friend circle of mine on telegram, I was asked by a friend about “How do we really help project maintainers with code ?”, which takes me to the point of

I honestly feel we might have helped FOSS projects just with “traction” and not real code or contribution. Also, for this maybe we could to do a survey kind of thing to testify whether any project received good code contributions with our help as such.

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No. New chapters are the only way to scale the community side of things. We might be rushing a bit is all.

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To which verticals are you referring? Could you please expand on those?

Currently, we have:

  1. Event/Community Management: Vishal, Ansh
  2. Tech: Harsh(he will be joining us full-time soon), Riya (she is also interested in contributing to the Season of Commits program) and Mangesh (intern)
  3. Design and Video Editing : Ajzal (part time, he can’t commit for long term continuation), Jeswin (still an intern, we are talking to him to onboard him as full time) and Jessica (her internship will be over by June)
  4. Social Media/Education: Karan (content, part-time) Varshita (social media manager, intern)
  5. Operations: Ruchika
  6. Public Policy: Venky
  7. Industry Partnership Manager: Athira. Since the Industry partnership program isn’t giving us results as we expected, In my opinion, we should start also focusing on our yearly events sponsorship/fund raising, donation campaigns as other source of fund for the foundation and we need someone who is coordinating for this full time or part time.

The new chapters are all a bottom-up approach. If anyone reaches out to us and shows a genuine interest in creating a FOSS community, we should give these interested individuals a chance and help them in getting started. If we don’t see results, we can move on.

One of the idea behind starting the FOSS United Foundation is to have full-time individuals to support local communities. This concept is similar to the GDG, but with true FOSS as the agenda. The GDG model is successful because they have full-time program managers.

Edit: I’ll put more comments on the weekend. I’m travelling this week.

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Marketing (social media) for one, I think this is not an immediate need of the foundation. Just to be clear, I was totally aware of us expanding in this domain and hiring people, and I felt the need too.

It is only after having these discussions and really thinking about where we are going as a FOSS community I feel that we should probably focus on other regions, at least for the next few years. I may have phrased this in the wrong way, I’m not saying that we are hiring the wrong or too many people,just that our focus is shifting to things that are not our immediate requirements.

The new chapters are all a bottom-up approach. If anyone reaches out to us and shows a genuine interest in creating a FOSS community, we should give these interested individuals a chance and help them in getting started. If we don’t see results, we can move on.

Agreed. As I said, this is the only way to scale the community and expand our reach to other cities. But with the very little time You and I have, how far can we really go until all we are doing is events (which have become low quality as per recent feedback), with no time to focus on helping FOSS developers? Is there are a number in our mind which we once cross, we’ll probably pause opening new chapters (and clubs - we currently plan to open 100 this year?)

And a ton of money :slight_smile:

Imagine, if they stop doing GSOC someday, which is a good source of income for many projects, saying it’s very easy for them to get contributors elsewhere

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Ansh, why don’t you put together a short note on this? If possible, also mention some FOSS projects that can be shortlisted for funding by VCs. I can share it with a couple of VCs that I know personally and check if there is interest.

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This is an experiment which is supposed to help us reach more people online. For example, Hari’s interview for a YouTube channel spread the word about ChennaiFOSS 2.0.

We can’t exclude marketing/education using social media at this time. We can ask for the feedback from the community to improve the content. Also, we have on-boarded 2 interns for three months for this this project. Above quote is from the discussion which happened in an internal meeting (Aug 2023).

To focus on other regions is a different topic. If you are suggesting that we need more people for expansion, then we probably do need to hire more staff. Social media management should be handled by a separate team and shouldn’t be dependent on expansion or the number of meetups.

Sorry, I was referring to the growth and sustainability model. Why couldn’t all the FOSS groups from the past sustain themselves? Because the volunteers moved on to their personal lives after a few years.

TinkerHub was also inactive because no one was working full-time for it. When Mehar started working full-time, things changed.

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To add my two cents, we live in the age of social media, so having a social media team is a “must have” not a “nice to have” nowadays.

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Slides: https://chaoss.github.io/website/CHAOSScon/2020EU/slides/seven_deadly_sins.pdf

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I do see the need of these different verticals. These comments of mine are out of confusion about our decision on pausing project grants (there is also no official post or statement I can refer to in this regards to understand better).

I really don’t agree with readily available VC funding as a good enough reason to not give grants to developers. If there are other reasons for this decision, I would love to know about that. I am more than willing to help out if this is a manpower or time issue.

But, if this is a problem of resources or a lack of funding, I strongly suggest:

  • We make sure that our other programs (be it marketing, hiring or even events) are not at the cost of not being able to fund FOSS projects.
  • We look for alternative ways to support these projects financially. Currently, we are redirecting them to other donor organisations, which is okay but can be structured better at the very least…

Sorry, I was referring to the growth and sustainability model. Why couldn’t all the FOSS groups from the past sustain themselves? Because the volunteers moved on to their personal lives after a few years.

Again, agreed. There isn’t any other FOSS community in India right now that has:

  • Great support from companies that care about FOSS
  • An amazing leadership and founding team
  • A team of full timers who are passionate about this mission.

Which is why, it is very crucial we put a great deal of thought into what our vision for the next few years is. Volunteer managed city chapters will come and go, we’ll still have a lot of good content from events that we can post as shorts a few months later, but some open source projects might not exist tomorrow if we don’t help them sustain today. Where we put our time and money today will decide that

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FWIW, in Frappe, we expect everyone to do social media as a part of their profile. It is now a days like email. You don’t need a special person to write emails. We don’t mandate anything to anyone, but having a decent social profile / followers is a career asset for everyone. So the incentives are baked-in.

So we should expect chapter leaders to make their own social posts.

Also our events generate great amount of video content, this editing is usually done by the vendor themselves.

At a meta level, we need to work out some governance mechanism for FOSS U. This is a good time as any since we are at the beginning of the financial year. Maybe we can re-think some of the hiring.

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In my understanding, the grants program was paused because of low uptake from the community. After three years, we didn’t have a lot of applications and some of the applications were related to community building (tinkerhub). While I don’t agree with the decision, it made sense at the time to pause the grants program, while we figure out how to improve participation from the community.

In my understanding, it boiled down to our institutional capacity at the time. We didn’t have the capacity to put in additional work or consider rewiring how we work to improve participation from the community.

Before we un-pause the grants program, we should engage with the projects that we have supported via grants. We should talk to them to understand

  • how did they come across the FOSS United grants program? This will help us understand if the word is reaching other FOSS communities in India
  • what impact did the grant have on the project? If we can’t understand what impact we had (or didn’t have), we can’t run the grants program successfully
  • what could FOSS United have done to have a larger impact on the project? VC firms don’t just give startups money, they also provide mentoring, guidance, networking, and more (e.g. YC)

If those conversations turn out well and we want to consider un-pausing the grants program, we will have to overhaul internal processes. What do i mean overhaul internal processes?

  • We should share information about these grants at meetups and via social media. We should reach out to the projects and see if they are interested in giving talks at city meetups. We could do short reels/videos with the projects/maintainers. We should share information about the impact the grants had on the project
  • Ensure that every city chapter is consistently communicating the fact that FOSS United provides grants for open source projects at every meetup. We should provide the specific points we want them to communicate to their audience. The FOSS United intro deck should be used, with city-specific addons if necessary, for all meetups
  • Significantly expand our outreach efforts, especially in-person communication about the grants program. A number of FOSS United representatives have spoken at FOSS communities in the country about the work we do. This number and frequency needs to increase considerably, ensuring that we have a higher chance of reaching the FOSS developers/maintainers/projects where they are instead of waiting for them to join our community and hear about the grants program
  • Q. Consider expanding the scope to allow not just grants for FOSS projects but also allow grants for developers who want to become maintainers of existing FOSS projects (that originated anywhere in the world)
  • Support grantee projects further by involving them in hackathons e.g. the Partner program for the upcoming FOSS Hack that @Riya_P_Mathew is leading, in my understanding

Reaching out and having a conversation with the existing grantee projects is, in my humble opinion, the first step in deciding whether or not to un-pause the grants program. And I suspect this is going to be 40-50 hours of effort by someone to setup the calls, have open conversations, document and share the discussions, and meet and discuss the conversations internally.

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what could FOSS United have done to have a larger impact on the project? VC firms don’t just give startups money, they also provide mentoring, guidance, networking, and more (e.g. YC)

Yes, We have an amazing network of people who’ve made startups out of FOSS and can provide more than just money. We can create a content pipeline by inviting these people to share their thoughts on problems,challenges and basics of FOSS entrepreneurial projects ( like startup school) , and if that is a huge commitment, maybe just get on regular calls with these developers to provide guidance. I think we’ll be able to find enough people who can participate in this

I am up for this. I will draft a proposal on the same, and start working on it after IndiaFOSS (provided I am not a dependency for other projects at FOSS United)

With @mriya11 leading partner projects for FOSS Hack, which can smoothly transition to Season of Commits which is the next big program coming up after IndiaFOSS, I think I may be able to pull this off.
cc @wisharya

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The effort doesn’t have to be concentrated into a single week. In fact, it might be best to slowly spend 5-ish hours per week for 10-ish weeks. This way, we can build and refine our conversations with subsequent grantee projects.

With @mriya11 leading partner projects for FOSS Hack, which can smoothly transition to Season of Commits which is the next big program coming up after IndiaFOSS, I think I may be able to pull this off.

I’m not sure what time commitments @wisharya and @Riya_P_Mathew have at the moment but it might be best if they take point on these conversations and we (@ansh and I) can be shadows. This is because these conversations also aid us in sponsorship and partnership conversations for IndiaFOSS 2024.

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Regular calls sounds like the “right” amount of effort, given the current institutional capacity of FOSS United. If that becomes regular and trivial to manage, FOSS United can then consider putting in more effort to bring in people from the community to mentor/provide guidance to grantee projects etc., that you mentioned above.

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Sorry, I couldn’t understand this. Can we please discuss this in the call (scheduled tomorrow)?

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