Tech report - July 2026

I did not plan to reflect. But a year is a nice round number, so allow me a short pause before the updates.

When I started, I thought this job was about building an events platform (just like you). Register, buy a ticket, submit a talk, review + manage proposals, attend the event and call it a day. And a lot of it is exactly that. But over twelve months the picture kept widening. FOSS United is not only about events. There are grants, fellowships, FOSS clubs in colleges, a maintainers program, an education program, self-hosting and promoting services, a jobs board, a directory of Indian maintainers and much more. Events are the part you can see easily; the programs are the part that quietly does the long work. That realisation is the theme of this month, so I will come back to it at the end.

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Looking back across the twelve months, the work tells its own story. It began with the parts that rarely get noticed: August and September laid down the jobs board, RSS, permissions, ticketing, schedules and the CFP flow, the groundwork where correctness is not optional. October brought the review system and mailing, November the events page redesign, the grants directory and RSVP self check-in with host approval, and December the quieter work: RSVP insights, CFP refinements, and a real accessibility pass.

January was mostly groundwork, and then February and March went almost entirely into FOSS Hack 2026: the hackathon page, dashboard dark mode, security hardening, the results page, and a rebuilt ticket purchase flow. From April to May the focus turned to the programs, the schedule redesign, the CFP reviewer workflow, Maintainers May, the IndiaFOSS 2026 kickoff. June lowered the barrier for new contributors, and July brings the rest of this post. A year on, the platform is less a ticketing tool and more the backbone of a foundation, and that shift is the thread running through all of it.

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First, the big technical news, and it is not even on this platform.

Forklore moved house. forklore.in, our directory of Indian FOSS maintainers, was built on Nuxt.js by Harsh Tandiya and designed by Antara Paul & Jeswin. It is, at heart, a site that shows mostly unchanging pages. Running a full JavaScript framework for that is like keeping a car idling in the driveway to charge your phone (bad pun, IK). So we migrated it to Eleventy (11ty), a plain static site generator. Fewer moving parts, faster pages, and far less that can break at two in the morning. The boring choice, and the right one. As a small team, "simple enough that it does not need babysitting" is a feature we value a lot.

This was the first official work Siddharth Bansal aka Siddharth II was assigned to and handled completely on his own. He made the migration in-place replace very much possible with nobody noticing it peculiarly. The whole data now stays in human readable mardown file itself compared to previous JSON pain.

We launched Licence to Learn. licencetolearn.in is a new campaigns program. India's premier institutes are largely public-funded, yet a lot of what they produce and decide sits behind closed doors. Licence to Learn collects and publishes RTI (Right to Information) responses from these institutes, so that what belongs in the public domain actually reaches the public. The site is built with Zola, another simple static site generator (you may notice a pattern in our taste this month). If you want to know who built it and the thinking behind it, the credits page has the people and the story. Do go read a few of the responses; some of them are eye-opening.

Then there is the usual IndiaFOSS hustle, which never really stops. This month we shipped a IndiaFOSS Talks Archive, a single place that aggregates every IndiaFOSS talk with links back to the speaker and the proposal. The 2026 landing page also grew a live countdown and a lighter, themed look. And behind the scenes, the whole CFP review process was reworked for the IndiaFOSS 2026 co-chairs, reviewers can now mark must-have talks, leave private notes for each other, and the proposers' editing window is properly controlled by the deadline. Reviewing hundreds of proposals is hard, human work; the least the software can do is get out of the way.

Now, two things about people, one bittersweet and one hopeful.

Muneer is moving on, sort of. Muneer was our design intern, and if you have liked how any social media posters looked around lately, some of that is his hand. He is now moving into a fellowship to work on the debian.org website, tackling its long-standing design and usability issues. So he is leaving our team, but not the ecosystem. He is going to make a much older, much larger piece of the FOSS commons a little friendlier for everyone.

And we are re-imagining our own front door. This connects back to what I said earlier. For a long time our landing page has told visitors that FOSS United does events. True, but incomplete. It says almost nothing about the grants that fund maintainers, the fellowships, the clubs, the education work, Licence to Learn, Forklore. So the whole team is now iterating on a redesign of the landing page and the top-level pages, to connect these dots and show the full shape of what this foundation actually does. It is early, we are still sketching and arguing (in the good way), but I wanted to share that it is happening.

As a small step in that direction, the /stack page was rebuilt this month to be cleaner, link to the live hosted tools we run, and carry a short note from the team, slowly turning it into a proper credits page for the software and people we lean on.

That is the state of things at one year in: a wider understanding of what we are, a few sites made simpler, a new campaign in the world, a friend off to help Debian, and a redesign that tries to tell our whole story instead of just the easy part. Thank you for reading these reports for a year. Here is to the next one.

Now, the technical list for those who like the details.

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CFP Review Process Overhaul (#1627)

Reviewers can now mark a proposal as "must-have" and leave private comments for other reviewers and organisers (added at the IndiaFOSS 2026 co-chairs' request). Reviews are hidden by default, proposers stop getting a notification on every review, and proposer editing is now controlled by the CFP deadline and status (fixes #1628). Proposal API access is limited to chapter members.

IndiaFOSS Talks Archive (#1635)

Visit: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/archive

A new Event Media doctype and archive page aggregate every IndiaFOSS talk, cross-linking each to its speaker profile, proposal, and schedule slot. Built to expand to other events later.

IndiaFOSS 2026 Landing

Visit: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026

Themed background pattern, hero image, a live hours:minutes:seconds countdown, and timeline ordering by deadline.

Stack / Credits Page

Visit: https://fossunited.org/stack

/stack rebuilt into a single template with richer fields (description, live hosted URL, status) and an optional credits section, on the way to merging /stack and /credits.

HTTPS Link Normalization (#1634)

Speaker social links are normalized to include https:// so they don't resolve as relative paths. First contribution from Akshit Tyagi.

Dashboard Performance (#1631)

Duplicate session user-profile API requests are now deduplicated. First contribution from Paramveer singh.

Documentation

A large education / Licence to Learn curriculum docs push and FOSS Club guideline updates (#1641, #1639). Credits: Siddharth I

Chapters & Jobs

Past chapter members shown on the chapter page; jobs page has a link to the Aikyam board for social-sector roles.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

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As always, feel free to drop suggestions and issues at GitHub.