Student Community of the year [FOSS Awards 2026]

Maintainers FOSS Awards
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Voting for FOSS Awards ends on September 7th, 2026. Voting is invite only, please go through this post for more information on who can vote (and how).

Student Community of the year

This award recognises student communities, clubs and groups that have not only spread awareness about FOSS, digital commons and open source in their college campuses, but also produced quality FOSS work and Maintainers.

Choose your pick
  • Centre for Open-Source Software and Hardware (COSH)
  • PointBlank
0 voters

The endorsements the above candidates received have been added as replies to this thread. If you’re a nominee, you’re welcome to post a brief endorsement below. Tell the community about your work in 2025-2026. Replies on this thread are reserved for nominees only.

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Nominations and Endorsements

COSH

  • The Centre for Open-source Software and Hardware is one of the few student bodies with insitutional backing that has been able to create an academia-industry-community bridge, enabling students to find and work on projects across various domains and disciplines. Also one of the very few student communities with whose work spans across domains like hardware, networking, etc. Prof. Mohit (see notes from the Evangelist category) has done an absolutely amazing job setting up the centre, whilst also keeping it free from the bureaucracy, hierarchies and Goodharts Law activities that we typically see in student communities. From Institution to Community: Building COSH and a Culture of Open Source
  • COSH has built FOSS apps for the industry and COSH members have made contributions to key projects like the Linux Kernel. In addition, COSH students also helped organize MangaloreFOSS

PointBlank

  • Point Blank is a student-driven tech and open-source community that has built an ecosystem around learning, collaboration, innovation, and healthy competition. Over the past 7 years, the club has introduced 300+ students to FOSS technologies, many of whom have gone on to become long-term contributors and maintainers. Point Blank also builds tools that other communities can use, while actively supporting and organizing events around the FOSS ecosystem.
    Contributions: Point Blank members have contributed 1000+ merged pull requests across 178 organizations, including LLVM, Rust, Julia, FreeCAD, the Linux Kernel, KDE, CRIU, and many others. If you use FOSS software on a daily basis, there is a fair chance that you have used code written by a Point Blank member.
    Volunteering: Point Blank members formed a major part of the volunteer force for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 editions of the Innovations in Compiler Technology Workshop, the 2026 Rust India Conference, the LLVM Social Bangalore Meetup in January 2026, and IndiaFOSS 2025. Our members are also volunteering in large numbers at IndiaFOSS 2026 and the FunCAML OCaml 2027 conference in January 2027. We are also hosting the Cloud and DevOps devroom at IndiaFOSS 2026.
    Organization: Point Blank has organized the internal round of Smart India Hackathon at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering every year since 2020. The 2025 edition saw over 1100 participants across 200+ teams. We also support multiple hackathons on campus, including Aventus, Hackman, Sandbox, and SEGFAULT @ IICT, while also hosting our own flagship events. Zenith, our hackathon, brings together some of the best student builders in India, and PBCTF, our Jeopardy-style CTF, is one of the city’s most anticipated cybersecurity challenges. We also organize Open Days, tech talks, and weekly coding contests open to the general public through PB Hustle. Our talks on cybersecurity, systems programming, open source, and competitive programming are regularly posted on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@pointblank_club. Our members have also given talks at flagship conferences such as KubeCon, IndiaFOSS, FOSSASIA, FSTTCS, and others.
    Competitions and FOSS programs: Point Blank has produced 36 Google Summer of Code mentees in the last 6 years, one of the highest numbers for any student community. What we are more proud of is that several of these individuals have stayed on as long-term maintainers and contributors to important projects such as CRIU, Swift, Alaska, OpenMF, the Linux Kernel, AnkiDroid, and Cedana. We have also produced 12 Linux Foundation mentees, 40+ Linux Foundation scholars, 50+ Smart India Hackathon winners, including 5 winning teams in 2025, 30+ ACM Summer and Winter School selections, and 50+ podium finishes at hackathons across India and abroad. We compete to benchmark ourselves against our peers, and our collective achievements make us one of the most active student-driven technical communities in India.
    Through these hackathons and programs, we have built and open-sourced multiple utilities on our GitHub: Point Blank · GitHub. These include firmware analysis tools, obfuscators, system hardening tools, DSLs, and other developer-focused projects.
    Point Blank deserves this recognition for its consistent contribution to the digital commons — through code, evangelism, mentorship, organizing events, and supporting the broader FOSS ecosystem. We do not contribute to just one corner of open source. We contribute across the stack.
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