TL;DR - I will not be resigning. We can improve, and I lay out a brief plan below on how.
A few folks have also asked me why I hadn’t responded publicly on this topic. On Monday, October 26th (last Monday), the @governing-board reached out to Vishal, Shree, and me via email, and asked us to take a cool-off period for at least one week, during which they asked us to refrain from posting further on these threads or related topics. This is why I refrained from posting on this topic, and stayed away from emails and personal DMs too. Unfortunately, this didn’t stop repeated attempts at goading me to respond on this topic and elsewhere.
I’ve shared a lightly edited version of my email to the @governing-board on 22nd October, a day after the “what ails FOSS United” topic, below.
The only thing apart from the email that I have to add is - the word “Governance” has been thrown around quite a lot so I’d also like to specifically point out that there have been no legal or regulatory or corporate governance lapses at the FOSS United Foundation. Absolutely none. The FOSS United Foundation is a Section 8 not-for-profit foundation.@fossdot and I are Directors, along with Prakash-ji from Frappe, and we take our responsibility seriously. Relevant reports and filings are submitted in a timely fashion with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Income Tax Department, other relevant Government authorities and our funders do their necessary due diligence before they financially support us. Communication lapses have been unduly painted as grave “governance” failures and a sense of nefariousness about my or the Foundations’ activities have been portrayed, and nothing could be further from the truth.
First, I’ll acknowledge and accept that communication lapses have occurred on my end. I listed three broad categories later in the email. But
None of that, or more, is reason for Shree to publicly and cruelly share an “expose” on the discourse forum. I don’t use the term cruelly lightly here - the repeated attempts at jokes interspersed with scathing comments about me personally and my team were jarring and cruel. Ultimately, I’m the CEO, and I’m to be held responsible. Both for my actions and my team’s. And such comments about my team on a public forum by someone whom we have worked closely with over the past two years and confided in are shocking. Please note: Shree is free to share his thoughts, but the Code of Conduct also applies to the discourse forum - and the post was offensive (aggressive, upsetting), to say the least. Please also note that this is at least the third time in three years that people have used the discourse forum to target and demean FOSS United Staff members, and many more times in private conversations, just because we work in the FOSS ecosystem for a not-for-profit foundation. This hurts the morale of the existing team, and if this becomes the culture of FOSS United, it makes it nigh impossible to hire anyone at the Foundation, let alone another CEO after I step down at the end of my tenure. Issues with staff performance have been raised in the past with me directly, and I believe that I’ve been able to address them. And if not me, the Governing Board is now in place to receive, communicate such issues.
Broad categories of communication lapses
- 2026 GB elections. The change in voting method (STAR voting instead of STV) was definitely last minute, and while we did receive feedback from one of the candidates against the use of this method, emails had already gone out to eligible voters that mentioned the STAR voting method. To avoid further confusion, and in hopes of a larger voter turnout, we chose to go forward with STAR. I took this decision. I didn’t want last-minute confusion again next year, which is why I worked on an Elections Working Group charter last Saturday (17 Oct). I was going to bring this up async this week for comments and to be ratified at the next GB meeting
- Financial audits, reporting, and bookkeeping. Almost no one at the FOSS United Foundation has prior experience working in the not-for-profit sector, and no one has a finance background. Now that our Programs have a clear structure, we started discussing internally how we should improve our bookkeeping to make it easy for Program Managers to look at our books and get a quick understanding of spending. This would also improve our ability to explain the audited financial statements and clear up some of the confusion that occurred when I presented the FY 25-26 audited financials at IndiaFOSS 2026. I also talked to Shemeer Babu, CEO of Aikyam Foundation, about helping us improve our bookkeeping and reporting, according to not-for-profit sector best practices. He immediately accepted and noted that we should have a call next week with Chhabil Gadia, their CFO, to help us with this matter. This call happened on Tuesday, 20 October.
- FY 2025-26 Annual Report. Leading up to IndiaFOSS 2026, I spent a significant amount of time putting together the Annual Report for FY 2025-26. I wrote it in Markdown format and shared a PDF version of the Markdown report at IndiaFOSS 2026. The report isn’t pretty - and I didn’t intend it to be. It was meant for community consumption, a community that is comfortable with GitHub and Markdown, and after IndiaFOSS 2026, I intended to work with Design and Tech volunteers to put together a better-designed version of the report for General public consumption. This is why I went to great lengths to put together relevant logos, photos, tables, and other metadata that I dug up from our system and added them to the Git repo. I have not been able to get around to coordinating with volunteers regarding this yet.
I intend now to dedicate my Nov-Dec 2026 to focus exclusively on Communication-related issues that have been piling up. I’m happy to lay out a plan of action and have a call next week to discuss it.
Finally, I’ll be locking this thread. Over the past week, it looks like this topic has spread to hundreds of Community members, and more who aren’t an active part of the Community, including people from partner organizations that we work with occasionally. A notification will land in thousands of email inboxes passively, this topic is still being shared around actively, and more people might feel compelled to write for or against my resignation.
As I outlined in the above email, we’ll keep the Community posted about our next steps and share public updates as and when changes are made.
If you’d like to help, please reach out to me with specifics at rahul at fossunited dot org. I need all the help I can get to build a solid base for the FOSS United Foundation before my end of tenure in March 2028.