Building Open Source Digital Infrastructure for a University

Most universities use many different websites and apps that are built by different teams. These systems often do not work well together. At IIT Bombay, we chose a different approach.

The Developers' Community (DevCom) builds and maintains open-source software for students. We develop projects like InstiApp, ResoBin, Mess-i, NewBee, and IOTA as one connected ecosystem instead of separate applications. These projects share code, APIs, authentication, and development practices.

In this talk, we will share what we learned while building and maintaining these open-source projects with a student community.

We will discuss:

• Sharing code, APIs, authentication, and infrastructure across projects.

• Writing code that is easy for new contributors to understand.

• Maintaining projects as student maintainers graduate and new contributors join.

• Using GitHub, code reviews, documentation, and open collaboration.

• Balancing new features with bug fixes, maintenance, and long-term stability.

This talk is not about one project. It is about building and growing an open-source community that develops software used by thousands of students every day.

• How DevCom built and grew an open-source community inside IIT Bombay.

• How we keep our projects alive even as student maintainers graduate every year.

• How we share code, APIs, and infrastructure across projects like InstiApp, ResoBin, Mess-i, NewBee, and IOTA.

• How we use GitHub, code reviews, documentation, and open collaboration to build better software.

• Lessons we learned from building and maintaining open-source software used by thousands of students every day.