Tech report - June 2026

This month I want to tell you a small story before the usual list of updates.

For most of its life, the FOSS United platform has been built by a handful of familiar hands. That is the quiet reality of a lot of community software: a few people carry it, month after month, because they care & get paid. It works, but it is fragile. A project is only as healthy as the number of people who can comfortably walk in and start helping.

June was the month a few new people walked in. And the first thing one of them did was make it easier for the next person to walk in after them.

Jasil Faras, contributing for the first time (as FOSS Hack 2026 contribution), did not start with a flashy feature. He wrote a seed script: a small piece of code that fills a fresh install with sample chapters, events, CFPs, and hackathons. If you have ever set up a new project and stared at an empty screen wondering "now what do I even click", you know exactly why this matters. A new contributor can now run the setup and immediately see a platform that looks alive, with real-looking data to poke at. Jasil also added more test factories, the plumbing that lets us write reliable tests without a lot of boilerplate. Unglamorous, deeply useful work.

bench execute fossunited.dev.seed.seed inside apps/fossunited directory, and you'll have all small replica of fossunited in your local setup, read more.

James Reilly, also a first-time contributor, worked on the same theme from another angle. He set up a proper local development flow, the kind where you run one command (just demo) and the whole thing comes up end to end, waiting patiently for the database to be ready before it does its thing. Less "it works on my machine", more "it works on yours too".

We are a small non-profit. We cannot pay our way to a bigger team. What we can do is make the door wider and the welcome warmer, so that people who want to contribute their time can actually do so without fighting the setup for a whole evening. June was a good month for that door. To Jasil, James, and Jeswin: thank you, and welcome.

And the circle grew on the inside too. Big news: I am no longer the only one breaking things in production. Please welcome Siddarth Bansal (@sidd190), our new tech intern. He works across both Forklore and FOSS United, so feel free to poke him with issues, ideas, or that one bug I've been quiet ignoring for three months. His initial work week plan is to rewrite the tech stack of Forklore to keep it simple with minimal SSG, more automation and less maintenance burden, current NuxtJS is kinda overall to maintain the npm depedency hell.

We now show badges on profiles. Hackathon winners carry a winner badge on their profile and project pages. And if your profile username or GitHub link matches a maintainer on Forklore (our directory of Indian FOSS maintainers), a Forklore badge shows up too. Small thing, but recognition is one of the few currencies a community actually runs on.

For event organisers, the CFP reviewing flow got real teeth. You can now assign a proposal to a specific reviewer from the dashboard, and that reviewer gets an email telling them a talk is waiting for their eyes, and who assigned it. Reviewing a conference's worth of proposals is genuinely hard work, and spreading it cleanly across a team is half the battle. Alongside this, CFP forms now close themselves once the deadline passes, no more remembering to manually flip a switch to "Closed".

We've also introduced "Favourite" and "Private comment" on each review for internal circulation and information for Organisers and other reviewers, so show strong preference and interest towards a proposal.

On that note, we removed a switch entirely. There used to be a "Show CFP / Show RSVP" toggle on events. It was redundant and could even contradict reality. Now the logic decides: RSVP shows until the venue is full, CFP shows until the deadline. The system should know these things on its own.

We also took a small pain away from organisers running paid conferences. Approved speakers usually get a free ticket, and sending those coupons one by one is tedious and error-prone. There is now a single button that sends free ticket coupons to every approved speaker, and it is safe to press more than once: it only sends to the people who have not received one yet. Boring on the surface, a real time-saver in practice.

Finally, a bit of spring cleaning. We replaced our hand-maintained rich text editor with the one that comes built into frappe-ui. This deleted close to 480 lines of our own code. As a small team, every line we do not have to maintain ourselves is a line we can spend somewhere that matters more. Leaning on the shared upstream tools, instead of reinventing them, is how a small org stays sane.

That is the state of things in June: a slightly bigger circle of people, a slightly easier path in, and a platform that asks its organisers to do a little less manual work. IndiaFOSS 2026 work continues steadily in the background.

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

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CFP Reviewer Assignment (#1592)

Organisers can assign proposals to specific reviewers from the dashboard. The assigned reviewer gets a custom email (built on Frappe's native assignment notification) noting who assigned it. CFP forms now also auto-close once the deadline passes.

Profile Badges (#1609)

Hackathon winner badges on profile and project pages, plus a Forklore maintainer badge when a profile's username or GitHub matches a Forklore maintainer (partially closes #1279).

Free Ticket Coupons for Speakers (#1605)

One button bulk-sends free ticket coupons to all approved-proposal speakers. Idempotent: re-running only sends to speakers who have not received one yet.

Event Manage Simplification

Removed the redundant "Show CFP / Show RSVP" toggle and the manage tab. Form visibility is now driven by logic: RSVP shows until full, CFP shows until the deadline.

Text Editor: frappe-ui Replacement

Replaced our custom Tiptap editor and comment box with frappe-ui's built-in editor. Near drop-in, ~480 fewer lines for us to maintain.

Local Dev & Seed Data (#1611, #1457)

One-command local demo setup (just demo) from James Reilly, and a developer_mode-guarded seed script that fills a fresh install with sample data from Jasil.

Test Factories (#1622)

Event Grant, Project Grant, and Hackathon Project factories. Credits: Jasil.

IndiaFOSS 2026

Themed devroom pattern banners (design: Jeswin Josu), manual control over the "deadline extended" date, and stats link enabled in the header.

FOSS Hack 2026 Results & Projects

Winner/commendation badges and partner-project links on results, team identity carried onto projects, and issue/PR counts on the projects page so the list can be sorted by activity.

RSVP

A full event now shows a clear "registration full" message instead of a 404, and the RSVP form stays reachable after an event concludes.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

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As always, drop suggestions and issues at GitHub or move to Codeberg.