Notes from the Maintainers Summit

In May 2025, a proposal went up asking Maintainer Summit be an IndiaFOSS Pre-event.

What if we could get a group of maintainers in the room, to discuss problems and solutions around maintaining open-source projects.

Four months later, 60-70 maintainers showed up for the first Maintainer Summit, an IndiaFOSS pre-event, and covered a wall with sticky notes on sustainability, grants, burnout and security.

We hosted the second edition of Maintainers Summit on 25th September, ahead of IndiaFOSS 2026. Almost hundred maintainers attended the event at the Samagata Foundation in Bengaluru for a full day of unconference sessions.

There was no pre-set schedule. Everyone who walked in could write a topic on a sticky note and pin it to the board, under a time slot and a room. If you proposed it, you didn't have to run it.

Some basic ground rules at the event were :

1. Don’t hijack the discussion
2. If discussion goes on beyond the session time, take it elsewhere
3. Proposer is NOT the moderator//everyone is responsible for direction-setting
4. Law of two feet
5. Don’t start with intros, opinions first - reverse bollywood

We also tried something new this time. Attendees were asked to fill in the Open-Source Ecosystem Canvas to map where their projects sit, and a round of Maintainers Bingo as an icebreaker activity.

(the worksheet)

(the bingo)

By 10am, we began with the topics proposed by the attendees. The proposal board was filled with sticky notes full of discussion topics in minutes.

A few themes stood out. AI was everywhere: there was an Open Source AI roundtable (limited capacity, so it got a room of its own), along with sessions on what maintainers' repos look like in the AI era, how you grow co-maintainers when agents are sending PRs, and how much AI is enough.

Another asked what role open-source language communities should play in evaluating LLMs. People were just as curious about the human side of maintenance: how to find the right contributors and retain them, dealing with volunteer burnout, what comes after college clubs, and more. We talked about FOSS United grants, FLOSS/fund and funding for FOSS towards the end.

Across the rooms, the conversations kept returning to one question: what happens once information is made available? Open data can disappear or go private, and having more of it doesn’t mean we understand it better. When a weather website crashed during the Nepal floods, it showed how public infrastructure gets tested at the worst moment.

On India’s data protection law, we talked about consent, purpose limitation, and who is responsible when compliance is outsourced, and we left with open questions about AI agents and innovation. And with LLMs trained on open knowledge, the idea we carried out was availability versus agency.

What's next

We're continuing the Maintainer Meetups through the year, and if you maintain something in India, we'd love to have you on forklore.in.

Huge thanks to all the volunteers, the Samagata Foundation for hosting us, the sponsors, and everyone who showed up and pinned a note to the wall. See you at the next Summit.

If you're an organisation that wants to give back to the Indian FOSS ecosystem, or a maintainer looking for support, reach out to us at maintainers@fosusnited.org