How we build Community Projects from the Community for the Community

New year of 2025 we launched tamilnadu.tech a tech event listing platform built by the souls of FOSS United Chennai, what started as a simple project was ultimately taken by the community and upgraded and updated with tons of improvements.

Built after listening to the problems faced by the community, tamilnadu.tech was instantly a hit and in a short span grew to nearly 300+ github stars with 100+ contributors where more than half of them are first time contributors to open source.

But not stopping with 1 project, in the New year of 2026 the same team of FOSS United Chennai launched another project called podu.pics a FOSS imgbb alternative because the images used in tamilnadu.tech were from imgbb and we had to build our own ;)

Again the community responded positively and took the product and used it and contributed to it.

with the latest product that we launched for ChennaiFOSS 2026
being kuruk.am a project again from the FU Chennai team being a url shortener which is also used by IndiaFOSS for their social media marketing.

• Build community driven projects that put the community in the driver seat

• How much importance it is to listen to the community for the problems and not build a made up solution to a problem that doesn’t exist

• As a maintainer how to be sure and take right decisions for the project’s growth and direction.