In this series of posts, I will talk about Learning to Manage - managing myself as a people manager, learning to manage a team, learning to build an organization and a community, learning to lead, and more. At the end of the day, I’m managing.

Why write about my experience in management? There are many reasons, but the primary one is repetition. Managing a team, in my personal experience, requires talking to the team about the same thing, over and over again, individually and as a group. We could be talking about philosophy, culture, mental models, frameworks, heuristics, or more. And everything is repeated multiple times because rewiring people’s minds to think differently takes time.

Let’s start with how we strive to build a common foundation for everyone within the team. One of the first things I did as soon as I started at the Foundation was create a “FOSS Reading Material” Mattermost channel to share “mandatory” reading material with the team. The Foundation staff had a few quirks - the team was young, the Foundation was their first and only experience with the FOSS ecosystem for most of them, and the Foundation was also the first job for most. I wanted to ensure that the team could at least learn through osmosis, so I shared the writings of people steeped in the Indian and Global FOSS ecosystem.

I shared posts by Armin Ronacher, creator of Python FOSS projects like Flask, Jinja2, and more, and I shared the talk on Technical leadership and glue work by Tanya Reilly, which is especially relevant given that most of the work we do at the Foundation is glue work for the Indian FOSS ecosystem. We read the influential Roads and Bridges report by Nadia Eghbal (Nadia Asparouhova). The report, though originally published in 2016, is still surprisingly relevant to understanding the dynamics of the FOSS ecosystem. You might also recognize her from her influential book Working in Public or the guide to financial support for open source that she maintains. I shared a post by Brett Cannon, Python core developer, on Saying thanks to Open Source Maintainers. To understand the value of project management in FOSS projects, I shared a keynote by Sumana Harihareswara. We discussed the Miranda Heath report on Burnout in Open Source Software, and we also watched the talk by Leonard Richardson, creator of Beautiful Soup, on how to maintain a popular python package for most of your life ~~without~~ with burning out.

To understand the Indian scenario, we read the State of FOSS in India report by CivicDataLab, the Analysis of FOSS Government Policies in India by Apar Gupta, the IT for Change policy brief on ICTs in School Education - Outsourced vs integrated approach, and the 2009 Study in India on the Economic impact of FOSS by Prof. Rahul De, IIMB. Later in the year, we started the Articles We Love forum category and shared articles/reports and summaries publicly.

Other team members slowly hopped on the wagon. For example, Ansh shared Balancing makers and takers to scale and sustain open source by Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, Mangesh shared the Write the Docs documentation best practices, and Siddharth shared the Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) Development syllabus at RIT, to name a few, and over time, the FOSS Reading Material evolved into the Digital Commons Reading Material.

For the young software team specifically, I shared Choose Boring Technology, and the concept of innovation tokens, and I shared articles on how to write code that reviewers will love and on how to review code as a human, although the last part might not be relevant in 2026 if AI is writing much of your code or if you’re relying on AI for reviews. We discussed the blameless postmortem culture and lessons learned in 35 years of making software, and we watched Rethinking the Developer Career Path by Randall Koutnik to gain a better understanding of our technical work and how we grow professionally.

This is only a small fraction of what we shared and discussed internally to build and sustain a common foundation for the staff. Some of these references came up independently in recent conversations, validating their timelessness. Life came full circle when a person I interviewed recently mentioned that the “Roads and Bridges” report helped her understand the FOSS/Digital Commons ecosystems. And the reading list grows every month, for as long as people from the digital commons ecosystems pen their thoughts and experiences, and we will continue reading to ensure that our understanding of the digital commons is larger than our own individual lived experiences within it.

Finally, over time, it’s important to understand that the shared foundations become shared abstractions. For instance, “being glue” is all I need to say to bring up the importance of glue work, “roads and bridges” is sufficient to bring up the importance of FOSS digital infrastructure, getting unstuck is short for project management advice for open source projects, and “solution implementer - problem solver - problem finder” is short for rethinking the developer career path.

What timeless FOSS/Digital Commons reading material have you come across? Please consider sharing it with us. And keep tuning in to the FOSS United blog to check in on how i’m Learning to Manage.

IndiaFOSS 2026 (#1595)

• The IndiaFOSS 2026 landing page is live. Has the full sponsor listing, program details, devrooms section listing all conference devrooms with their organisers and Timeline section for event tracking.

• Design assets by Jeswin Josu.

• Visit: fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026 (go grab IndiaFOSS 2026 tickets now)

Maintainers May (#1581)

• Landing page for Maintainers May is up. Lists all the city meetups happening across India this month as part of the campaign.

City Community Map

• The communities page now has an India map with all FOSS United chapters plotted by city. Good way to see how spread out the community actually is. (Kerala is doing the most, unsurprisingly.)

Post-Event Feedback (#1579)

• After an event ends, attendees now automatically get an email with a feedback link. Now the scheduler handles it.

• Note: This feedback is only read by FOSS United staff and is not distributed to organizers, so feel free to share as much feedback for us to improve and know more.

Jobs Board: Search + Filters (#1572)

• The jobs listing page now has a search bar and category filter. Also added a closed_on date field so archived listings show when the position was actually closed rather than just disappearing.

Buy Tickets: Slot Count + Billing Summary (#1599)

Two additions to the ticket purchase flow:

• Remaining ticket slot shown per tier on the selection step - useful when slots are limited (go grab IndiaFOSS 2026 tickets now).
• Billing step now has a summary panel on the right showing your full order (tiers, attendees, t-shirts, total) without needing to scroll to final step only.

Speaker Form Pre-fill

• CFP speaker form is now pre-filled from your FOSS United profile and from user's recent submission. Repeat speakers don't have to re-enter everything from scratch.

Ticketing: T-shirt Bundled Tiers

• Higher-price tiers can now have a t-shirt included in the price (not as a separate add-on). Tracked properly in the backend so organisers can manage sizes and delivery per tier. IndiaFOSS contributor ticket is the first use of this.

Subscribe to upcoming Events in Your Calendar

• You can now subscribe to all upcoming FOSS United events directly in your calendar app — no more checking the website manually. Events auto-refresh hourly, so anything new shows up automatically.

• Subscribe using this ICS feed URL:

  https://fossunited.org/api/method/fossunited.api.chapter.upcoming_events_ics

• Shown in Timeline page and further help on RSS and staying updated.

Test Suite Refactoring (#1593, #1585, #1584, #1583)

• Factory-based test pattern is now consistent across ticketing, user profiles, hackathon, and free ticket tests. More deterministic, less boilerplate per test. All credits to Harsh Tandiya for the patient work here.

Docs (#1588, #1580)

• Incident response checklist got a clarity pass, clubs overview updated. Credits: Siddharth.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · Docs page

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

I document and archive languages spoken by South Asian communities. In this region, we speak over 800 languages. Since most of the remaining languages are spoken rather than written, documenting them in audio and video formats is critical to their promotion and preservation. I am not a developer but a steward, and have been maintaining the FOSS required by many such languages.

There are two large areas where language technology support is poorer: script-related support for local languages with scripts, and support for the rest of the languages, since their issues are not well documented.

Emerging tools

OpenSpeaks Subtitler in action (Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

At OpenSpeaks, we maintain a small suite of open-source projects focused on multilingual audio-visual media, metadata, and documentation. These tools include: Subtitler (repo), an audio and video caption/subtitle editor; Tome (repo), a metadata editor; and Bento (repo), a media file and folder organiser, duration calculator, and media converter. These web apps are intended to work offline (with limited functionality) or over slow internet connections, allowing field documenters to use them on the go. Internally, we use many other open-source tools and utilities for automation, file management, and administrative purposes. Previously, we have created many other open-source tools, both at OpenSpeaks and at O Foundation, our parent organisation, mostly related to language technology.

Chapakala

Chapakala is an open-source Odia typeface revival project that Nasim Ali and I started in 2024. Chapakala19 revives a 19th-century workhorse typeface, and Chapakala 20 revives a similar 20th-century workhorse typeface. This is arguably the first full-fledged typeface revival project in Odia and will help reproduce old text, create new artistic and other designs, and improve optical character recognition (OCR) software. Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, has not been trained for Odia since 2009 and has never been trained for letterpress-era fonts. Over 15,000 digitally archived books remain almost inaccessible due to a lack of OCR training.

Past projects

There are several open-source, open knowledge and open data projects I have built, co-created, largely contributed to, and maintained in the past. Some are not maintained or archived; some are maintained by others; some I continue to maintain; and some are included in larger projects. Some of these projects include:

Transliteration, Lekhani and OdiScript input methods

A handful of us were involved in reviving the nine-year-dormant Odia Wikipedia in early 2011. The earliest contributors, us, were not fluent in typing in InScript, an input method made by the Indian government. Enter transliteration, an intuitive near-phonetic input method. I worked closely with Junaid P.V., a developer and a Malayalam Wikimedian who had already mapped the Odia characters to Malayalam and many other Indian scripts. It was included in the Narayam input method extension in MediaWiki, the wiki software behind Wikipedia, among others, and later became a part of the official Wikimedia input methods called Universal Language Selector (ULS). As our contribution grew, we realised we were typing more and needed a phonetic keyboard optimised for Odia. I led the development of the Lekhani input method. It drew inspiration from Oriya phonetic typing in Ubuntu and the Oriya-QUERTY keyboard on macOS. Most of us switched to Lekhani immediately, and it remains the most widely used Odia input method on Wikimedia projects to date. I also worked on making Lekhani work on the now-defunct Firefox OS and macOS. The Indic Keyboard Android app also included Lekhani and Transliteration. Together with Manoj Sahukar, I also co-created OdiaScript, an Odia input method based on the popular Modular input method.

A FirefoxOS phone showing Lekhani input method (Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

OpenSpeaks Data Pages

Speech synthesis has always fascinated me as a technology. During 2014-2015, I reviewed the quality of eSpeak, an open-source speech synthesiser for Odia, as part of a Centre for Internet and Society project. While eSpeak remains one of the oldest and most widely used text-to-speech systems for Indian languages, its synthesised voice sounds unnatural and is hard to use for long periods. Though it’s possible to build high-quality speech synthesis models with less data now, training speech synthesis models requires a lot of voice data. We also brought the Odia Wiktionary to life, a dictionary with meanings in many languages. Shitikantha Dash, a fellow Wikimedian, helped add over 100K headwords from the 1930–1941 lexicon Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha. I started recording words to add pronunciations to Wiktionary and build a dataset for a future ASR project. Then, I started a project called Kathabhidhana based on a Python script written by Shrinivasan T. Later, open-source projects Lingua Libre, where I was a top contributor across all the languages supported at the time, and Mozilla Common Voice made this process easier. This project, with over 78,000 recordings, became the largest Odia voice dataset to be published with a Public Domain release. It was later archived in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital records while serving over 21,000 pages on Wiktionary.

Encoding converters in Odia

Legacy typefaces with ASCII or ISCII that predate the Unicode standard have long been used across Indian scripts, especially in the printing industry. Though Odia (then Oriya) was encoded in the Unicode standard in 1991, the publishing and broadcasting industries did not adopt Unicode-compliant typefaces for nearly three decades. In fact, many publishers continue to use legacy ASCII typefaces to date. The Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities struggled to extract text from content typed in such typefaces. Most Indian languages underwent a major shift, with digital and online content available in Unicode, while print and broadcast typesetting used fonts in legacy encodings. Companies that built fonts had their own proprietary encoding; sometimes, a single company made changes to the encoding with each release. So, encoding converters were built to ensure users could convert legacy text to Unicode.

Srujanika, a nonprofit based in Bhubaneswar, took the first step toward creating an Odia encoding converter. We, the Odia Wikimedia community, needed to access e-book and e-newspaper content. So, we built encoding converters and released them publicly as open source software. I was involved in co-creating (with Jnanaranjan Sahu, who built the most stable version of a converter, Manoj Sahukar, and Shitikantha Dash), testing, creating user guides, and promoting the converters publicly. As a result, we saw a significant increase in Unicode content first on social media, then on-wiki, and in many other places. I continue to maintain many of these converters. Most type foundries that the print industry relies on have released their own encoding converters.

Other tools

Ol Chiki (Santali-language script) keyboard layout for Sarjom Baha input method (Photo: Pooja Saxena and Subhashish Panigrahi / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Project Ol Chiki: I developed and coordinated this project at Access to Knowledge (A2K), a programme at the Centre for Internet and Society. In collaboration with Santali-language experts Damayanti Beshra, Malati and Mangat Murmu, Kuanra Murmu and Raj Narayan Marndi, we created an open-source font (designed by Pooja Saxena) and an input method (developed by Jnanaranjan Sahu and Nasim Ali). I maintained the tools till the Santali Wikimedians took control of the project. Guru Gomke, the font and Sarjom Baha, the input method, continued to be widely used

Growing up, I was always driven by a desire to learn, figure things out, and build things that matter. For a long time, that drive had a very specific destination in my mind. Like many who want to create systemic, wide-reaching change in India, being an IAS officer was my dream.

But when I graduated in 2008 with a degree in Information Systems, the immediate trajectory took me straight into the proprietary corporate tech machine.

My first role involved working on build and release systems for closed-source software. It was a fantastic engineering foundation, but it left me with a lingering question that tied right back to my original dream: How can I use this immense power of software for the public good?

By 2012, that question became too loud to ignore. I took a leap into the unknown, left the corporate world, and supported myself through freelance translation just to give myself the space to explore. That was when I discovered the world of open-source tools and community-driven ecosystems like Wikipedia, Wikimaps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Seeing how everyday citizens, armed with open tools and data, could actively shape disaster response, infrastructure, and urban planning changed everything for me. I realized that public service didn't have to look like a traditional bureaucratic career. FOSS isn’t just a development methodology rather it is a vehicle for public equity at a massive scale.

Geospatial world

In 2015, as mobile internet exploded across India and location intelligence startups began cropping up, I stepped full-time into the geospatial sector. I tried everything in the geospatial domain from data generation to data engineering, community training, and field operations. I learned about the geospatial world from the ground up.

When the company I was working for closed its India operations, I was offered a relocation to the US. It was a tempting corporate safety net, but I chose to decline it to stay close to my family. That choice redirected my career in the best way possible. In 2018, I joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) as a remote backend consultant.

Scaling FOSS Products

Over the years, my role evolved from writing code to shaping global product strategy. Today, I primarily serve as a Product Manager at HOTOSM, owning the roadmap for tools that operate at scale:

Managing these platforms comes with a unique, exciting constraint: we have no in-house engineering team, which means my day-to-day involves managing the full vendor lifecycle from procurement and contracting to coordinating external contributor teams across multiple time zones.

In parallel, I get to operate as the Operations and Product Lead for MapLibre, an open-source nonprofit providing cutting-edge mapping libraries. Here, I manage and coordinate with a global governing board, handle sponsor relations, and guide community engagement.

My core philosophy

What I love most about this work is how it bridges the gap between high-level technology and raw, human reality. My job has taken me to places across the world to conduct pilot training and drone mobilization.

Interestingly, my professional work has bled into my personal downtime. I’ve become an avid drone flyer. There is something profoundly beautiful about switching between a bird’s-eye view of a terrain and the close-up, human reality on the ground.

In many ways, my core philosophy on technology stems from the Brazilian film City of God. The movie details the realities of an informal settlement in Rio de Janeiro, but its soul lies in the character of Rocket, a young boy who escapes that cycle of violence entirely through the power of a camera lens. That film has always stayed with me because it serves as the ultimate proof of my deepest conviction that access to tools and information changes the trajectory of lives.

What’s Next?

My FOSS journey has been anything but linear. It required intentional pauses, turning down traditional corporate safety nets, and learning how to lead with empathy across diverse cultures.

As I look to the future, my ultimate goal is to evolve this experience into a sustainable, mission-driven organization that champions civic tech and open digital infrastructure on a global scale.

The childhood dream of public service never left me, it just evolved. By being in FOSS, I get to serve communities not just locally, but globally.

Story and insights by Ramya Ragupathy; copy editing and language refinement assisted by Gemini.

Six years later, Scrite has been used by ~50k users and we are nearing ~2k paid subscribers. It supports screenwriting in English and several Indian languages, and is now adding French, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Films written in Scrite have made it to festivals. Writers share their work on social media. People compare it to Final Draft. I mean, THE FINAL DRAFT.

None of that felt inevitable when I was hacking together the first prototype. And a significant chunk of the growth in the last couple of years, I can trace directly back to FOSS United and the community around it.

This is the story of five specific things that happened because I showed up.

The GitHub Panic and the Refactor

Sometime in mid 2025, Scrite got listed in the FOSS United Forklore directory.

I noticed a sudden surge in GitHub activity. New eyes on the code, people asking questions I hadn't been asked before.

I started panicking.

The thing is, Scrite started as a prototype. A personal project I built in a lockdown to scratch my own itch. At some point, prototype became production software. And along the way, I had collected one too many hacks. The kind of code you write when you're moving fast and promising yourself you'll clean it up later. Well, later had arrived.

Getting approved for a talk at IndiaFOSS was what finally forced my hand. Nothing like a public commitment to make you actually do the thing. I used the deadline as a forcing function and spent the months before the conference doing a serious refactor and rewrite of large parts of the codebase.

The result was Scrite Version 2.0, which released in Jan 2026. Better performance, cleaner internals, new features. The fear factor worked. I'm not sure I'd have done it otherwise.

Kailash's Talk and the Alar API

Scrite has supported Indian language input from the very beginning. That was Director Abhaya Simha's doing, really. When I showed him the first version, his immediate question was: does it support Kannada? That one question set the direction.

But what we had for a long time was fairly basic. You'd switch the input method, type in your script, and Scrite would handle the font and rendering. It worked, but it wasn't particularly elegant.

At MangaloreFOSS, I attended a talk by Kailash about Alar, a Kannada-English dictionary and transliteration API.

Something clicked. I went back and integrated the Alar HTTP REST API into Scrite's language input system. Now, as a writer types phonetically in English, Scrite fetches transliteration suggestions from Alar and shows them in a small popup. The writer picks the right word and keeps going.

That was the obvious use case. But then I got some interesting feedback. It turns out, some actors prefer reading Kannada dialogue in phonetic English rather than in the Kannada script. They're more comfortable with it, and it's easier to learn lines that way. So I've been meaning to build reverse transliteration: using the Alar dictionary to automatically convert Kannada text back into phonetic English. A writer writes in Kannada, an actor reads it in English. Same words, different script.

The idea for this feature implementation came directly from a talk I went to because I showed up at a conference. I hadn't gone looking for it. It found me.

The Designer and Twenty Years of GUI Eyes

I have been writing GUI applications since 2001. You'd think that after twenty years I'd have decent design instincts. I didn't, really. I just had developer eyes, which is a very different thing.

At one of the FOSS United events, I met Jeswin, a designer. We ended up chatting for a while. He looked at Scrite's UI and said something simple: your icons are all from different families. Pick one family and stick to it.

That was it. That was the whole insight. One hour, one conversation, and it fixed something I had been looking at for years without seeing. I went back and replaced all the icons with a consistent set from the same family.

The difference was immediately visible, and the feedback from users reflected it.

I think about that conversation a lot. Twenty years of building GUIs and it took a designer at a FOSS conference to tell me something I should have known. The community gives you things you didn't know you were missing.

A Samosa Break and the Help Center

At another FOSS United event, during a samosa and coffee break, someone mentioned MKDocs. That one offhand conversation led to something that has genuinely changed how I handle support.

I rebuilt Scrite's user guide as a markdown-based site using MKDocs.

The nice thing about MKDocs is that it generates a JSON search index alongside the site.

Once I had that, I built a Help Center directly into Scrite, triggered by pressing F1. It queries the user guide index and surfaces relevant articles right inside the app, without the user having to leave what they're doing or open a browser.

Support tickets dropped noticeably after that. Writers found answers themselves. The ones who did write in were asking more specific, more interesting questions. It's one of those features that sounds small but has a disproportionate impact on both the user experience and on my own time.

All of it came from a break-time conversation.

Interns, PDFs, and On-Device AI

Through FOSS United, I got connected with IIIT Delhi and was able to engage interns to work on two problems I had been putting off for a long time.

The first was PDF import. A lot of screenwriters receive scripts as PDFs, and there was no good way to bring those into Scrite. The interns have built a command line utility to parse PDF screenplays and convert them to the Fountain format, which Scrite can then import. It's not accurate, but they have done an excellent job of exploring potential approaches.

The second was on-device AI summaries. Writers often work on long scripts and need to quickly recall what a scene is about, or what a particular character has done so far. The second team of interns built support for running a local Ollama instance to generate scene and character summaries without sending any data to the cloud. Privacy-first, which matters a lot to writers working on unproduced material. Again, its not entirely functional but has enough potential to eventually make it to the app.

I've been thinking about the next step, which is feeding those AI summaries into image generators to give writers instant storyboards. Early days, but the foundation is there.

Neither of these would have happened without the FOSS United network. I didn't have the bandwidth to do them myself, and I wouldn't have known where to find the right people.

A Lawyer and Patent Troll Defense

This one I hadn't expected at all.

Through FOSS United, I met a lawyer named Biju. I hadn't really thought about Scrite's legal posture, to be honest. Terms of use, privacy policy, that sort of thing had been sitting on a vague to-do list for a while. Biju will now be able to do a proper review and help us with that.

More importantly, he helped Scrite sign up with the LOT and Open Invention Network.

LOT & OIN are community-based patent non-aggression pact. Members cross-license their patents to each other and collectively defend against frivolous patent trolls. For a small open-source project that has started gaining real visibility, that kind of protection matters more than I had realised.

I had been thinking about FOSS United primarily as a technical community. The fact that it also connects you with legal expertise was a genuine surprise and a genuinely useful one.

The Pat on the Back

I want to mention one more thing, which is harder to quantify but no less real.

Building something for six years, mostly with a small team, can get lonely. There are stretches where you're deep in a refactor nobody sees, or handling support tickets at 11pm, or trying to figure out pricing for a market you don't fully understand.

Kailash, Rahul, Ansh, Shree, Jeswin and many from FOSS United, at different points, said encouraging things about Scrite and about the possibility of grants and support.

“In less than 10 years, make Scrite the global gold standard.” - Kailash Nadh

“We’d be happy to consider a grant proposal from Scrite” - Rahul Poruri

“Scrite should be a partner project at FOSSHack2026” - Ansh Arora

Those conversations didn't change any code or ship any features. But they mattered. Knowing that people whose work you respect are paying attention and rooting for you, that does something to your energy levels.

The community pat on the back is real!

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Out

If you are building something open source and you are not plugged into FOSS United, you are leaving a lot on the table.

Not because the community will do the work for you. It won't. But because the right conversation at the right time, with the right person, can unblock something you've been stuck on for months. A designer at a conference fixed my icons. A break-time chat about documentation changed how I handle support. An intern connection gave me features I couldn't build alone. A lawyer I'd never have found otherwise protected my project from patent risk.

None of these were planned. All of them happened because I showed up, gave talks, attended sessions, and talked to people.

Scrite is what it is today partly because of the code I wrote, and partly because of the community I found. I'm grateful for both.

What's Next?

The journey continues. A few things I'm working towards:

We are applying for a grant with FOSS United to help fund some of Scrite's running costs: server infrastructure, certificates, software licenses. These are the invisible costs that every open-source project eventually has to reckon with, and it's encouraging that there is a structure in place to help with exactly this.

I'll keep attending the monthly meetups, participating in forums, and listening. Some of the best things that have happened to Scrite came from conversations I wasn't looking for. That's reason enough to keep showing up.

Call for Action: Join FOSSUnited!

I want to be honest about something. Every time I attend a FOSS United meetup or conference, I find myself in the company of people who are orders of magnitude smarter and wiser than I can hope to be. And yet it never feels intimidating. It feels nurturing. That's a rare thing, and it's worth naming.

There is always something to learn. Whether from Anoop and the team behind Bruno, or Vishnu and the team behind Ente, or from speakers like Rajendran of OpenAlgo, Nilesh Trivedi of QwikBuild, Shree, Anand, and many many more. Every meetup I come back with something I didn't have before, an idea, a tool, a contact, a perspective.

The team at FOSS United is working to build a comprehensive community structure to support FOSS activity across India. Whether you want to keep your project purely open source, or explore monetisation, or build a for-profit enterprise around it, the support structure, the resource pool, the experience, and most importantly the intent to help, is real.

And it's not just for adults. My 14 year old son started learning Blender at 10. At FOSS United events he has given a talk, conducted a workshop, received a grant, delivered another talk, and just published a full Blender Basics course in Kannada. That journey is a full post, and maybe he will write it. But the short version is: the community works at any age.

The more we participate, the more we discover ways to make things better for future contributors to come. Come, let's build something larger together.

Prashanth Udupa is a software developer, trainer, and open-source creator based in Bengaluru. He is the creator of Scrite. You can watch the full talk on YouTube. Check out his profile on forklore.in

Attendees: Ashlesh, Bowrna, Nemo, Rahul, Shree, Swastik. Bodhish was unfortunately not able to attend due to a prior engagement. Ashlesh also had to leave the call partway through.

On the 27th of April 2026, Shree Kumar, on behalf of the Governing Board, wrote to Rahul, recommending his extension as the CEO of the FOSS United Foundation, noting that the overall perception has been highly positive. In the email, he also asked Rahul to walk the GB through the coming two years. Before sharing his thoughts for the coming two years, Rahul asked the members of the GB what they believed we should focus on.

1. Nemo highlighted that “maintainers” should be the focus. He noted that recent changes, such as the new Maintainers Program and the Forklore campaign, are a step in the right direction, but noted the need to double down on this demographic. He observed that events take up a significant bandwidth of the Foundation’s time and energy.
2. Swastik highlighted that involving companies in the FOSS ecosystem should be a focus of the Foundation. He also noted that lesser emphasis should be placed on FOSS Clubs as the interest from students wanes over time, and that the students might not stay in the FOSS ecosystem after graduating.

Rahul highlighted three broad themes of focus over the coming two years: Internal/ Foundation front, Governing Board-related, and External.

Foundation / Internal

On the Internal/Foundation front, he noted three further themes that will be his focus - Staffing, Culture, and Transparency.

1. Rahul noted that activity at the Foundation used to be heavily cyclical, with IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack being the primary activities. But this has changed over the past two years with the introduction of newer programs and campaigns. This has unfortunately created a staffing crunch at the Foundation, leading to Nemo's observation earlier about events taking up a significant bandwidth. Addressing this chronic staffing issue should improve staff morale and productivity significantly, and we’re making good progress towards this. Currently, the Foundation has hired two interns for Campaigns and Advocacy work, and is in the process of hiring a full-time events associate and an additional intern for the Maintainers Program.
2. As staffing problems are resolved, the team culture is of utmost importance. While the team culture is already in a great place, we intend to push this further over the coming two years by simply coming together for an offsite every quarter. This is especially necessary given that most of the staff are now spread across the length (not breadth) of India.
3. Finally, we will focus on improving transparency, specifically the transparency of decision-making that involves the broader Indian FOSS ecosystem. For instance, the staff is already sharing information with the GB about tentative grants decisions, but this can be improved further.

(Thought when writing the notes: Promoting and supporting the Indian FOSS ecosystem is a lofty goal, and transparency of decision-making is the bedrock upon which we will be able to stake our credibility and do our work)

External

On the External front, he noted three additional themes that will be our focus: Community and Funder messaging and Ecosystem management.

1. Even within the FOSS United Community, volunteers and regular participants don’t understand the full extent of activities at the Foundation, so it’s understandable when the broader Indian FOSS ecosystem sees us either as an events organising community or as a grant-giving organisation. This perception actively harms the possibility of achieving our stated goals. Over the past two years, we have experimented and refined our messaging. Over the coming months, we will reach out to Community partners in the Indian FOSS/Digital Commons ecosystem to help them fully understand what the Foundation stands for, and the various ways we could work together.
2. Similarly, the Foundation has struggled to attract new funders, but with the Maintainers Program, we are on the cusp of a clear value proposition/RoI for potential funders. We have already received informal confirmation of financial support from two new organisations for the Maintainers Program, and we intend to reach out to more over the coming months.
3. Finally, our work and the decisions we take every day are only as good as the information we receive from the ground. This is one of the reasons why the team spread out from Bengaluru to ensure that we have a direct line to FOSS/Digital Commons communities across the country. But we need to take this further by ensuring that the entire staff is involved in Ecosystem management. All staff are expected to participate in FOSS/Digital Commons communities and maintain relationships with members of the various communities regularly, e.g., via quarterly calls. This will help us avoid recency bias, where we work with the communities that we interacted with the most recently, instead of the communities that are most suited for the task at hand, and ensure that we’re not leaving things up to chance. Regular interactions with community members have already led to interesting outcomes over the past two years, and involving most of the staff will hopefully enable regular activity with a larger range of communities and organisations.

Governing Board

On the Governing Board front, there is only one focus - Working Groups.

1. Rahul noted that establishing one active Working Group per year will be the focus going forward, and Shree noted that our earlier imagination of Working Groups required significantly more volunteers/time than is realistic.
2. Rahul noted that the Grants Working Group is the closest to being ready, and Nemo noted that he will work to finish the WG charter. The staff will continue informing the GB about tentative grant decision-making in the meantime.
3. Additionally, Bowrna’s recent work talking to the staff is well-scoped and WG-worthy, and Rahul will work with Bowrna to figure out what this WG could look like.
4. In addition to the WGs, the GB has discussed the need to meet more than once a month, to speed up GB decision-making and to move the WGs along, but coordinating five people once a month is hard enough.
5. Instead of a second or a third GB meeting, the Foundation will organise community calls twice a month - on the first and third Mondays of every month. Earlier community calls were completely unscripted, but going forward, the calls will be partially planned. For instance, one of the calls will share a quarterly update of Campaigns, another will share an update of the Maintainers Program, and a third will share progress of FOSS Clubs. There will still be time during the calls for unscripted questions from the participants like before, but this opens up a new possibility for the GB members to opt in, when time permits, on a topic that they feel strongly about. Picking specific themes for community calls was suggested many moons ago by a participant in a community call, so it’s good to see things come together this way.

Miscellaneous

1. Nemo asked whether the Foundation used any tool for task tracking, and Rahul noted that we intend to start using GitHub projects, especially for instances where tasks are delegated across a large number of people, like IndiaFOSS. We are open to other task management software.
2. Nemo also asked if we were using a CRM to keep track of all of the communities and people we were talking to, and Rahul noted that we were considering using a tool like Frappe CRM or Monica CRM. Ashlesh put together an org rolodex, and we are finally beginning to incorporate it into the day-to-day functioning of the staff, hopefully making the transition into a full-blown CRM easier.
3. Nemo noted the importance of FOMO when attracting Indian orgs to fund our efforts, and that if one of the Indian unicorns funds our programs, convincing the rest should be easier.
4. Swastik also requested that the GB be kept in the loop about IndiaFOSS progress, noting that he received a number of questions about IndiaFOSS last year that he was unable to answer due to poor messaging.

Schedule Page Redesign (#1548)

The event schedule page is rebuilt. Two views: list and all-day timeline grid.

Visit: ChennaiFOSS 2026 Schedule

Code of Conduct

CoC acceptance checkbox added to RSVP, buy tickets (attendee step), and CFP form. Field recorded on the respective doctypes. Mandatory.

• Visit: https://fossunited.org/code-of-conduct

FOSS Hack 2026

Added FOSS Hack 2026 Judges to fosshack page.

• Visit: https://fossunited.org/fosshack/2026

CFP Reviewer Workflow (#1565, #1553, #1544)

Reviewers can now edit proposal fields inline on the public proposal page. Withdrawn proposals hidden by default; toggle to show/hide reviewed ones. Speaker contact_info field added for event coordination.

Enhanced security around Proposal Submission data.

Proposal Form

Improved Accessibility (a11y) on end-to-end proposal submission form.

• Proposal Submission open for IndiaFOSS 2026

DocShare for Events (#1552)

Events docitem is now shared via Frappe DocShare to all event_members. Purpose is to get volunteers help for ticket checkin for paid events.

Clubs Documentation (#1556, #1562)

Holistic clubs documentation, what a FOSS Club is, how to start one, support available. Clubs listing page now has search. Docs structure for clubs and other initiatives revised.

Credits: Siddharth

For full list of changes: CHANGELOG · docs

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

Maintainer May Month [MMM] - incoming. Stay alert.

The March 2026 Governing Board (GB) call took place on Tuesday, 24 March 2026. In attendance were members of the board: Bowrna Prabhakaran, Nemo, Swastik Banarwal, and Shree Kumar. They were joined by Poruri Sai Rahul from the FOSS United staff.

(Poruri Sai Rahul took notes and also drafted the post)

Staffing and salary heads:

1. Rahul led the call, first sharing information about the pay scales at the Foundation.
2. Program Associate - 6-10 Lakhs INR per annum (LPA)
3. Program Manager - 10-14 LPA
4. Senior Program Manager - 15-20 LPA
5. Program Director - 20-25 LPA
6. CXO - 30-36 LPA
7. Bodhish quickly pointed out that the pay scales aren’t in line with pay in the for-profit tech industry. He argued that while FOSS United Foundation is a Section-8 not-for-profit organisation, the Foundation predominantly hires from the technology sector.
8. Rahul noted that our pay scales incorporated reports about pay in the social sector, and that our pay is on the higher end of the range for social sector pay.
9. Bodhish noted that we shouldn’t be benchmarking ourselves to the social sector. As an organisation that is working to push the industry forward, it is worth benchmarking ourselves against the industry. With the current pay scales, he argues that it is unlikely for us to find strong technical and managerial talent, especially at and above the Senior Program Manager level. He recommended revising the pay sales upwards.
10. Rahul sought everyone’s feedback on revising the pay scales, and that an evidence-backed approach would ensure that we can justify the revised pay structure to existing and future industry partners. It is worth noting that most of the team (5 out of 8) doesn’t have prior work experience, which is one of the reasons why we have been able to adjust to lower pay scales. The remaining 3, hired in 2024 (Rahul), 2025 (Ashlesh), and 2026 (Siddharth), will be at the Senior Program Manager level and above in the next FY.
11. With this in mind, we looked at the budget, starting with salaries. The CEO’s (Rahul) salary is bumped from 30 LPA to 33 LPA, a 10% increase. It is worth noting that no salary increment happened in the previous Financial Year, and Rahul will be completing his second year on the job. After Rahul, everyone's salaries were discussed, and how they compared with the previous FY. It is worth noting that Ashlesh is being promoted to Senior Program Manager (Advocacy and Campaigns) and that Jeswin was promoted to Program Manager (Design) after IndiaFOSS 2025 in the FY 2025-2026.
12. The salary head in the budget also contains provision for two new hires at the Program Manager level and multiple interns, accounting for 22,40,000 INR of potential additional expenditure. The salary head totals 1,32,12,000 (1.32 Cr) INR. In addition to the salary, the budget includes an allocation of 5 Lakhs INR as “Bonus and Miscellaneous” expenses for the Staff.
13. Please note that, unlike most Social Sector organizations, our staff isn’t divided amongst the Programs, with their salaries budgeted into the Program cost. We are in the process of establishing Programs, with budget allocation for a few members of the Staff, but we do not fit into the existing mold of Social Sector orgs, because of which our Salary budget will continue to remain a significant portion of our total budget.
14. Going back to the discussion surrounding pay scales, Nemo asked how this would affect existing pay. Rahul noted that the new bands could come into effect in FY 2027-28, and that the “Miscellaneous + Bonus” budget item can be used to make up for the severe shortfall in pay for relevant Staff.
    

Budget snapshot

1. Apart from Salaries, the rest of the operations budget looks as follows -
2. Travel - Estimated 10 L INR, estimated expenditure in the current FY (2025-26) - 11 L INR
3. Server Bills - 4 L INR, estimated expenditure in the current FY (2025-26) 3 L INR
4. Office Expenses - 5 L INR, estimated expenditure in the current FY (2025-26) 9 L INR
5. Miscellaneous+Bonus - 5 L INR. This is a new budget item in the next FY (2026-27)
6. Accounting - 5L INR, estimated expenditure in the current FY (2025-26) 3.5 L INR
7. Health Insurance Reimbursement - 1.2L INR, estimated expenditure in current FY (2025-26) 3.2 L INR
8. It is worth clarifying the “Office Expenses” head. Unfortunately, we believe that some of the expenditure during the current FY (2025-26) was miscategorised, because of which the estimated expenditure under this budget head is dramatically higher than the budget estimate. We will work with the accounting team to fix this in the future and ensure appropriate categorisation of such team expenses.
9. Bodhish prompted the need to include Token costs under the Server Bills budget head, which we hadn’t taken into consideration earlier.
10. Shree asked for clarification on the “Accounting” budget item, and I clarified that this is the professional fees to the accounting team (BOCo) for our accounting and audit needs. Bodhish pointed out that the expenditure was on the lower end, as the Big 4 Accounting teams cost more than 10 Lakhs INR.
11. Additionally, we are considering moving away from Corporate Health Insurance to reimbursing the personal health insurance premiums for team members, which is the reason behind the significant decrease in the budget head for “Health Insurance Reimbursement”.
12. Bodhish also recommended not moving away from Corporate Health Insurance. He mentioned that Corporate Health Insurance plans offer the benefit of full coverage from Day 1, while personal health insurance plans usually don’t. He recommended not cutting costs in this particular part of employee benefits, as this disproportionately affects Staff with prior medical conditions.
    

Programs Budget

1. Moving on, the Programs budget looks as follows
2. IndiaFOSS - 0 INR, estimated profit in the current FY (2025-26) - 10 L INR
3. FOSS Hack - 10 L INR, estimated expenditure in current FY (2025-26) 10 L INR
4. Season of Commits - 2.5 L INR, estimated expenditure in current FY (2025-26) 75,000 INR
5. FOSS Communities, estimated combined expenditure in current FY (2025-26) 2.3 L INR
6. City Communities - 5 L INR
7. FOSS Clubs - 7.5L      
8. Grants - 50 Lakhs INR, estimated combined expenditure in current FY (2025-26) 30 Lakhs INR
9. Repeat Project Grant - 11 L
10. Repeat Event Grant - 3 L
11. Repeat Fellowship Grant - 15 L
12. New Project Grant - 6 L
13. New Event Grant - 2 L
14. New Fellowship Grant - 3 L
15. Miscellaneous - 10 L
16. Rahul clarified the following about the Programs budget
17. IndiaFOSS turned a profit in 2025, and we are currently not budgeting any amount for IndiaFOSS 2026. We expect to turn a profit from IndiaFOSS 2026, but we would like to assure the Governing Board and the Community that if necessary, the Foundation has savings of up to 30 Lakhs INR to dip into
18. Only one person participated in Season of Commits in 2025, but we are already seeing significant interest in Season of Commits in 2026, therefore the budget allocation remains the same. We also expect to support a few FOSS Hack 2026 participants via Season of Commits 2026
19. The Foundation significantly underperformed when it comes to supporting City Communities and Student Clubs, with only 2.5 Lakhs INR estimated spent on an allocated 17.5 Lakhs INR during the current FY 2025-26. We suspect that some of the additional expenditure noted under “Office Expenses” should actually be categorised here, but that still doesn’t fully address the underspending. City Communities and Student Clubs are the lifeblood of the FOSS United Community, and we intend to support this work as budgeted in the next FY
20. Finally, the Grants budget estimate increased close to 100%, because even after disbursing close to 30 Lakhs INR in grants, we still observed significant and genuine demand for financial support from various parts of the Indian FOSS ecosystem
21. Shree pointed out that the FOSS Clubs page on fossunited.org explicitly states that clubs are eligible for up to 50,000 INR per FY, and wondered why the Clubs hadn’t reached out to spend this allocation.
22. Rahul noted that there are significant gaps in understanding in the Community when it comes to Foundation Programs, including Volunteers in the City Communities, Student Clubs, and more. And while the Staff followed up with the volunteers regularly, we clearly didn’t do a good enough job to ensure that they understood their current expenditure.
23. Nemo pointed out the need for a “money in the bank” dashboard for clubs and communities, which is already being implemented by the Staff.
24. Nemo and Bodhi also pointed out the need for an onboarding checklist for communities. While an onboarding checklist exists, communities change dramatically over time, so Rahul noted that the Staff is also working on repeated check-ins and relevant checklists.
    
25. In total, the budget estimate for the FY 2026-27 is 2,37,32,000 INR (2.3 Cr). This is a 10% increase on the budget estimate for the current FY 2025-26 of 2,16,43,333 (2.16 Cr) and a 35% increase on the estimated expenditure for the current FY 2025-26 of 1,69,82,110 INR (1.7 Cr). Please note that the significant gap between the budget estimate and the estimated expenditure for the current FY 2025-26 is primarily because of reduced salary expenditure of almost 20 Lakhs INR and reduced spend on Communities of almost 10 Lakhs INR.
26. Nemo reminded us that the Governing Board is not fiscally responsible for the FOSS United Foundation, and asked how we should move ahead. Rahul noted that we still need external advice to ensure our budgets remain sane and to help rearrange our work into appropriate Programs, which could help us fundraise better.
27. Bodhish pointed out that organisations usually prefer funding Programs as it’s easier to evaluate how the Program fits into the donor's goals and it’s easier to evaluate the impact of any donations.
    

Miscellaneous

1. We unfortunately weren’t able to address the second topic on the agenda - progress on the Governing Board charter. We discussed that the Grants Working Group was the furthest along and that the Foundation will set up a recurring meeting with the Governing Board members to discuss and make final decisions on future Grants applications.
2. Bowrna was only able to join towards the end of the call, but after reviewing the budget information, she asked how the staff felt about the salaries and about their career progression.
3. After a brief conversation about each of the staff members with Rahul, she noted that she would like to schedule individual meetings with everyone on the staff to discuss, amongst other things, their pay and their career progression. Rahul welcomed this, as an independent evaluation of staff morale helps the Foundation. After having conversations, Bowrna will compile their responses into anonymous feedback and share it with Rahul and the rest of the Governing Board to discuss further actions.
4. Rahul noted at the end of the call that his employment contract is structured as a 2-year term, with an extension of 2 years contingent on confirmation by the elected Governing Board. He requested the Governing Board members to discuss amongst themselves and share a response. Shree asked Rahul to send an email to the Governing Board's internal email group, after which the group will deliberate and respond within a month.

FOSS Hack 2026 (#1480, #1478)

• The FOSS Hack results page is now live, showing previous year winners with profile photos pulled from user profiles. Participant entries now link directly to their team and project, and admins can disqualify participants as a direct action.

• Hackathon projects become read-only after the event ends, and contributors can now specify an open-source license on their projects.

  Check out the results: FOSS Hack Results Page

Ticket Purchase Redesign (#1511)

• Complete redesign of the buy tickets page as a multi-step wizard with a progress indicator: Select Tiers → Attendee Details → Verify → Billing → Download Ticket. Mandatory fields now show asterisks, and the page properly adapts to dark mode.

Dashboard Sidebar Refactor (#1492)

• The custom dashboard sidebar has been replaced with the official frappe-ui sidebar component. The sidebar is now collapsible with icons on child items, saving screen space for users.

RSS Ecosystem Expansion (#1451, #1454, #1462)

• Three new RSS feeds added this month:

  • Job Board: fossunited.org/jobs/rss.xml
  • Grantees: fossunited.org/grants/grantees/rss.xml
  • Chapter Events: fossunited.org/c/indiafoss/rss.xml

• See RSS docs for all feeds.

Partner Projects Page (#1448)

• New dedicated page for partner and contributor projects with a responsive grid, project type indicator icons, and search functionality. Visit: FOSSUnited Partner Page

Accessibility Improvements (#1456, #1489, #1490, #1493)

• ARIA roles added across Jinja templates, and aria-label attributes added to all icon-only buttons in public pages and dashboard components (FileUploader, CommentBox, TextEditor toolbar).

Security & Performance (#1467, #1471, #1468)

• Replaced the custom HTML sanitizer with DOMPurify for robust XSS prevention. Added profile image size limits with decompression bomb handling. Fonts now load non-blocking with font-display: swap, and legacy TTF/WOFF1 formats have been dropped.

Profile, CFP & Events (#1459, #1479, #1509, #1476)

• User profiles now show a projects section and event volunteership (even outside chapter membership). Proposal owners can now edit their CFP submissions from the public proposal page. Concluded events show a clear "event has concluded" message instead of stale registration forms.

Localhost Check-in & Docs (#1445, #1481, #1491)

• Localhost participant check-in added to the dashboard. Developer onboarding guide overhauled with Docker+macOS setup instructions and troubleshooting fixes. Event deletion alternatives are now documented.

Late-March Polish (#1513, #1514, #1526)

• RSVP success page now shows a newsletter subscription button. Dashboard sidebar cleaned up (removed duplicate theme/collapse buttons left over from the refactor). Dark mode transition between sidebar and main content is now in sync.

For more updates, please check out CHANGELOG or the documentation page.

As always feel free to drop your suggestions and open issues over at Git or Codeberg

No fooling around anymore, See you in April.

Hackathon Page Redesign (#1430, #1429, #1417)

• Complete redesign of default hackathon page (frappe template) matching the event page design with v3.0 styling. Added project contribution carousel and dedicated projects listing page. Check out FOSS Hack 2026 Default for the new look!

• Participant Registration now properly validates closure dates, shows city names for convenience to pick localhost.

• Display accurate participant counts across localhost venues based on Accepted Attendees and Interested (counted as no. of likes + applications.

Dashboard Dark Mode (#1428)

• Added dark mode support to the entire dashboard using frappe-ui colors! The dashboard now respects your system theme preferences and provides a consistent dark mode experience across all pages.

Security Improvements (#1398, #1397, #1401)

• Major work in this month as focused on Security issues and setting permission checks on doctype controller via `has_permission()`` method

• Implemented rate limiting to prevent abuse, fixed ticket transfer validation vulnerabilities, and hardened hackathon participant APIs. Added team member validation in project creation and XSS prevention across user profiles, project descriptions, and CFP submissions.

• Credits to @ni5arga (Nisarga Adhikary) and @kewonit (Kartik Kulloli) for security research and contributions!

RSVP Experience (#1419, #1405)

• Guest users now get clear success feedback after RSVP submission with disabled submit button to prevent duplicates. Added table view toggle in RSVP insights, and manual check-in button now only enables during event days. RSVP pages now follow v3 design for consistency.

Event Timeline Updates (#1436, #1435)

• Accepted event grants now appear in events timeline and RSS feed as upcoming events! Made agenda more compact with icons (especially useful for hackathon schedules). Online meeting links are now supported via the talk_video field.

Hackathon Management (#1424, #1412, #1407)

• Participants are now automatically synced to localhost email groups based on acceptance status. Added permission controllers to prevent participants from joining multiple teams. Localhost hackathons can now manage event sponsors directly.

• Read more in docs for participants & localhost organizers

Jobs & CI (#1396, #1423)

• Added publish date tracking for job board. Integrated Frappe semgrep rules and conventional commit linter in CI for better code quality.

• Documentation site has been migrated from material mkDocs to Zensical.

For more updates, please check out CHANGELOG in the repo or in documentation page. You can catch up on Forklore updates here.

As always feel free to drop your suggestions and open issues over at Git or codeberg

March Is Coming. So Are the Hackers.

NMG was started as a yearly ₹1,00,000 no-strings-attached, micro-grant to support meaningful work happening in India by Thejesh GN. Thejesh is a FOSS and Open Data veteran, and was also one of the organisers of the Open Data devroom at IndiaFOSS 2025. He is the co-founder and chairman of DataMeet, the biggest community of data science and open data enthusiasts in India.

“The reason for the grant could be anything as long its meaningful to you and people around. Though I prefer free and open source or creative commons projects, It’s not a must. It’s a no strings attached grant.”

Over the years, NMG has supported FOSS/digital commons work across Design, Geospatial technology, FOSS mirrors and infra, and more. If you have been active in the FOSS United community, you will find a lot of familiar names in the list of past NMG grantees. It’s always interesting for us to discover channels that have organically developed a pool of people doing interesting digital commons work, and we want to support such initiatives. This is part of a new experiment on our part to identify “Lighthouses in the Digital Commons”, i.e., people who have been bringing people together in the digital commons for many years. Supporting “Lighthouses” enables us to expand our reach, while also platforming the work of the “Lighthouse”.

In 2026, FOSS United Foundation will be contributing INR 2L to NMG, which brings the total grants pool to INR 5L as of February 2026. Our support is not restricted to code or technical contributions, but any work in the public commons, including data, design, services, art, documentation, research, or tangible creations under FOSS/Creative Commons licenses.

You can apply for a grant here

The February 2026 Governing Board (GB) call took place on Wednesday, 25 Feb 2026. In attendance were members of the board: Bowrna Prabhakaran, Nemo, Swastik Banarwal, and Shree Kumar. They were joined by Poruri Sai Rahul and Ansh Arora from the FOSS United staff. The call primarily focused on Grants.

(Poruri Sai Rahul took notes and also drafted the post)

Grants and recap

1. Ansh walked through the 2025 grants recap, and he then shared grants projections for the FY 2026-27. At the moment, we project an overall grants budget of 50 Lakhs INR, with close to 25 Lakhs INR being allocated for previous and current grantees and 25 Lakhs INR for new grantees.
2. Shree asked us about a recent announcement about our support for the Nagarathna Memorial Grant by Thejesh G N, particularly the details about potential grantees. Ansh clarified that our support via NMG is for any work in the digital commons and not just for code.

We weren’t able to bring this up during the GB call, but Thejesh is part of a new experiment on our part to identify “Lighthouses in the Digital Commons”, i.e., people who have been bringing people together in the digital commons for many years. Supporting “Lighthouses” enables us to expand our reach, while also platforming the work of the “Lighthouse”. We intend to find more “trustworthy Lighthouses” and reach out to people in the broader digital commons ecosystem.

Travel grants, FOSDEM and more.

1. One of the largest grant categories in the current FY is the FOSDEM travel grants for FOSS project creators and maintainers, with more than 3 Lakh INR. Swastik asked us to clarify how we decided on the travel scholarships. Ansh and Nemo elaborated on the FOSDEM situation.
2. FOSS United and FLOSS/Fund, funding.json were allocated a shared booth at FOSDEM, but the Foundation team strongly believed in platforming FOSS developers from our community at the event instead of travelling ourselves. Because the booth needed to have a FOSS United or FLOSS/Fund angle, we decided to go ahead with Prasun @ Zasper, Murtaza and Hussain @ Rethink DNS, and Anand and Laurens @ Ente, because Zasper and Rethink DNS are FOSS United grantees and Ente is a FLOSS/Fund grantee. We got to know that Mecha was also attending the event, and we decided to stretch the booth to include a “projects from India” angle to enable Mecha to showcase their work from our booth. We worked with Nemo to represent the Foundation at the Booth and to ensure that no favouritism was being displayed at the booth amongst the showcased projects. We also supported Nemo with travel support to and from FOSDEM. 
3. Swastik called out that a 1 Lakh INR travel grant was a significant amount, and that he was expecting a smaller travel grant, maybe 50K INR. Rahul clarified that we settled on 1 Lakh INR after looking at travel, accommodation, and visa expenses, and in fact, all of the travel support grantees submitted bills larger than 1 Lakh INR, but their reimbursement is capped at 1 Lakh INR. Ansh also noted that we intend to expand this to support domestic conference travel up to 15,000 INR. Ansh noted that Nemo and the grantees shared that the support was an overall success, but that the process for choosing projects needs to be formalised next year.
4. Rahul proposed working with the Project Showcase booths at IndiaFOSS as part of the overall criteria for next year’s FOSDEM. Ansh mentioned that he will be reaching out to FOSDEM organisers to seek their feedback about our booth and the possibility of continuing this next year.

Fiscal Hosting

1. Multiple grant conversations have highlighted the need for a fiscal host, both for project grants and event grants. Events organised by communities are looking for a fiscal host, both to take care of ticketing and to handle vendor payments and the like. Project grants, on the other hand, were interested in finding a fiscal host who could accept donations on their behalf and handle project-related expenses.
2. Becoming a fiscal host isn’t without its challenges - especially because we do not have an FCRA, and therefore, we are unable to accept international payments from potential sponsors or donors.

Maintainer Programs

1. Rahul highlighted that the FY 2026-27 budget will carve out a new Maintainers Program, within which the grants budget would be covered, including the administrative costs to manage the program. Rahul briefly noted that non-profit organisations generally seek project/program-specific funding, and the Maintainers Program is the distillation of our learnings over the past few years about a clear need in the Indian FOSS ecosystem.
2. Rahul believes that carving out this program and seeking sponsors for it separately might enable FOSS United to raise funds from new donors over the coming FY.
3. Nemo pointed out that seeking new donors for grants subcategories, e.g., diversity scholarships, travel scholarships, might also be worth pursuing.
4. Nemo also called out the need to better acknowledge FOSS United funders, and Rahul noted that the Foundation is working to increase awareness of grantee projects, and that such opportunities will also be used to highlight funders.

Infrastructure Grants

1. Bowrna asked about projects reaching out about infrastructure grants, e.g., to pay AWS usage bills. Ansh clarified that Circuitverse is, in fact, an infrastructure grant where we pay for their AWS usage bills.
2. Nemo asked about the possibility of reaching out to a cloud-service provider, noting that Hetzner has a significant presence in the EU FOSS scene.
3. Ansh pointed out the multiple conversations we have had with AWS around IndiaFOSS, but unfortunately, the conversations ended with us being redirected to the US-based AWS open source team.
4. Infrastructure grant requests are likely to exceed 5 Lakh INR in the FY 2026-27, so we will be reaching out to additional cloud-service providers, e.g., E2E Networks, Yotta, regarding potential support. Nemo also asked about the possibility of FOSS United receiving credits from cloud-service providers, given our prominent stature, and using the credits to support FOSS project infrastructure costs. Ansh pointed out that we hadn’t explored this option and that we could follow up on this.

Miscellaneous

1. While waiting for everyone to join, we briefly chatted about the winners of the NASSCOM Maker Honor awards, 3 of whom are familiar faces in the FOSS United community, and one more case study from the compendium is also a familiar face from Forklore. It’s good to see FOSS work getting recognised by the broader Indian software ecosystem.
2. Towards the end, Rahul shared brief updates about the 80G reapplication process, which has been stuck for multiple years, but has recently started showing progress after a visit to the relevant Income Tax (Exemptions) office in Mumbai. Rahul also shared a brief update about the Mozilla FOSS AI event that happened in Bengaluru on Saturday, the 21st of February.
3. As for the next meeting in March, Shree asked to see the overall budget for the upcoming FY 2026-27.

Greetings!

Welcome to FOSS United's February Newsletter. While we are still trying to come to terms with the fact that 2026 is here, January has already slipped away in a flash, that is, unless you are BADBADNOTGOOD. But more importantly, headlines first, we have dates for IndiaFOSS 2026, yes, you heard it right. Week of Sept 26-27th. SAVE THE DATE!

Highlights

It is FOSS Hack time of the year

FOSS Hack is back for its 6th edition! Have you registered?

Register Now!

Same same but different different.

Instead of a hectic weekend sprint, this time, the hackathon will run through the month of March, an attempt at sustaining momentum, patience and making meaningful contributions.

It takes a village… to sustain the FOSS ecosystem, and a whole lot of them never open a code editor. This time FOSS Hack is accepting non-code contributions too :)

FOSS United at FOSDEM 2026

FOSDEM 2026 concluded last week in Brussels. This time, we supported a handful of Indian FOSS projects to show up and represent the FU community and FLOSS/fund at our booth @FOSDEM.

Among the projects that we supported were: Ente, Zasper and Rethink DNS. They were joined by Nemo and folks from Mecha Systems at the booth.

Follow this thread for FOSDEM updates :)

2025: A year in grants @FU

I've always felt January is just admin. The real New Year kicks in around February. On that note, check out FOSS United's recap of Grants through 2025 and a small window into how 2026 might turn out to be.

Read: 2025 Grants Recap

Tech-Policy Fellowships through FOSS United [New]

We've always believed that code doesn't exist in a vacuum, nor should people who write it! Over the last few years, we've run a scholarship for FOSS technologists to pursue the GCPP Tech-Policy course at the Takshashila.

In addition to this, starting 2026, we'll also be offering scholarships for community members who want to pursue the Policy in Action program offered by Young Leaders for Active Citizenship. Check it out, APPLY!

Upcoming Events

• [FOSS meetup Prayagraj](https://fossunited.org/c/prayagraj/feb-2026) | Virtual | Feb 03
• [BangPypers x SciPy India – Feb Python Meetup](https://fossunited.org/c/scipy-india/bangpypers-x-scipy-india-february-python-meetup) | Bangalore | Feb 21
• [FOSS Activity Mangalore](https://fossunited.org/c/mangalore/manglore-feb-2026) | Feb 28
• [FOSS meetup Bangalore](https://fossunited.org/c/bengaluru/mar-2026-1) | March 01
• [AI Impact Summit](https://impact.indiaai.gov.in/) | New Delhi | Feb 16 onwards
• [The Encryption Equation](https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QPLAYi77RpKfiXmNXrCelA#/registration) | Virtual | Feb 04
• [Governing Digital Thirst](https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/event/governing-digital-thirst-communicating-inequality-in-ai-infrastructures-water-footprint/) | Virtual | Feb 23
• [Tech Impact and Policy Center's Winter Seminars](https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/content/2026-winter-seminar-series) | Virtual
• [Future of the Commons Talks](https://foc.oki-india.org/) |

To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, please visit the FOSS Events Timeline.

Community Corner

Jobs and Grants

• FOSS United Grants | Rolling Basis
• FLOSS/fund | Rolling Basis
• Nagarathna Memorial Grant | Deadline: March 15
• NGI Fediversity | Deadline: April 01
• NGI Zero Commons Fund | Deadline: April 1

News

• 25 years of Wikipedia
• Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026 | AI Now Institute
• Code is cheap. Show me the talk. - nadh.in
• Science Is Drowning in AI Slop - The Atlantic | Ross Andersen
• Owners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy
• Top 50 Open Source Conferences in 2026 | OSI
• Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer by Mecha Systems Inc | Kickstarter
• In a world run by AI, the early-career professionals stand to lose the most | The Indian Express | Sai Rahul Poruri
• Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era
• Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech | The Register
• Synthetic Media in Elections and Politics in India | Prateek Waghre
• The Grok Disaster Isn't An Anomaly. It Follows Warnings That Were Ignored.
• When I signed up to make deliveries on Zomato, Blinkit and Swiggy for a day | Long Reads News - The Indian Express
• Why experts say AI tool to detect Bangladeshis will be open to misuse | Tabassum Barnagarwala
• Cloud outages 2025: how global businesses survived blackouts - Rest of World | Damilare Dosunmu
• Data & Society | Turning the Tide: Climate Action In and Against Tech

Project Showcase

• An open source ledger for news stories that shouldn't expire
• Reas - a simple, lightweight, free reference list manager
• Halfsies - An expense splitter in your browser
• A minimal, interactive license generator that fetches licenses from GitHub's official API

Want to showcase your project? Post it on the forum, and we'll include it in our next edition!

FU Housekeeping

Forklore

Here's who joined the lore last month, projects worth bookmarking, and the maintainers behind them worth knowing:

• AltSendme and Tony Antony
• Shubham Kumar and Twig
• Ankur Ankan with pgmpy

Know someone who should be here? Let us know!

Monthly Tech Report

Check out FOSS United Platform's Monthly Tech report for January 2026!

Have thoughts on the newsletter? Reach out to us at team@fossunited.org

"May the FOSS be with you" 🚀

FOSS United. Strengthening the Indian FOSS ecosystem.

Our community thrives on respect, inclusivity, and collaboration. Read our Code of Conduct.

We started the year strong with major redesigns, FOSS Hack 2026 preparations, and several quality-of-life improvements for event organisers. We've shipped a complete Events Timeline redesign, overhauled the entire Grants pages and introduced hackathon localhost management via dashboard.

Events Timeline Redesign (#1375, #1383)

• The events timeline page now sports v3.0 design with better visual hierarchy and rounded corners (embrace modernity!). Events are split into clear "Upcoming" and "Completed" sections. Added RSS feed support (#1380) and lazy loading for better performance.

  -> Events Timeline

  -> Catch up on upcoming events via RSS: https://fossunited.org/events/timeline/rss

Grants Page Redesign (#1347, #1348, #1349)

• Complete redesign of all grants-related pages including landing page, individual grant types, and directory. Added new Grantees page (#1356) showing all recipients.

  -> Grants

Hackathon Management (#1360, #1361, #1369)

• Localhost hackathon management significantly improved with dedicated edit pages, team-based attendee grouping, and integrated mailing functionality. Accepted participants are automatically added to localhost email groups.

  Read more info in docs for participant & localhost

Common Save Action Bar (#1370)

• Dashboard forms now use unified sticky save/cancel action bar at the bottom for consistent UX across event editing, chapter details, RSVP forms, and hackathon configuration.

Event Publishing Toggle (#1382)

• Organisers can now quickly publish/unpublish events directly from the event details page with a toggle button.

Sponsor Sorting (#1354)

• Event sponsors now display with Patrons and Industry Partners first, followed by others sorted by confirmation date within each tier or alphabetically.

DocsInfo support (#1359)

• Added docs info bar to link to documentation for that page.

  Please let us know what documentation you'd like to get.

For more updates, please check out CHANGELOG in the repo or in documentation page. You can catch up on Forklore updates here. For more information and follow-up, please check our Project Dashboard As always feel free to drop your suggestions and open issues over at Git

Happy budgeting ahead :-)

2025 was an interesting year for the FOSS United Foundation in many ways. We started new programs ( forklore.in, Season of Commits), organised and participated in more events, and received increased media coverage. We also organised the biggest ever and a self-sustaining IndiaFOSS. We believe that the success of these initiatives is an indicator of the overall health of the growing FOSS ecosystem in India. For example, 11 out of 18 IndiaFOSS sponsors this year were Open Source companies.

A significant increase in grant activity and the number of projects showcased at events (and on the forum) this year indicates that Indian developers are becoming increasingly interested in building FOSS. We find this a new development, and the trends here are worth sharing with the community.

Through 2025, along with the community, we’ve also been able to draft and refine the FOSS United Grants Thesis. Check out the final version here.

The grants program

The FOSS United grants program aims to provide financial support to FOSS projects and events all over India. To date, we have disbursed over INR 2.5 crores ($110K approximately) towards Indian FOSS projects and maintainers. We have a 25L yearly grants budget that is split across project and event grants. Note that the budget is set across financial years (April 2025 - April 2026), and for the purpose of this post, we will mention the grants that were disbursed in 2025 (Jan-Dec). The total figure may include some ongoing grants from the previous year, as well as some that have yet to be disbursed.

In this calendar year, we received almost 200 grant requests. Around 20% of those requests were for direct FOSS work - project grants, infrastructure grants, fellowships, research funding; and the remaining 150+ were events.

Out of these, we approved 28 grants throughout the year. Here is a list of our grantees and fellows from 2025, along with grant amounts -

Project Grants (Jan- Dec 2025)

Fellowships (Jan- Dec 2025)

All the event grants are listed on fossunited.org/grants

Miscellaneous grants (Jan- Dec 2025)

Travel grants to events, diversity support and exhibit sponsorships are new experiments that we started this year. Our rationale behind these miscellaneous grants is outlined in the grants thesis.

Grants Allotment (FY 25-26)

* Amounts are rounded off for simplicity

* Only amounts that were disbursed in this financial year (April 2025-Present) are mentioned here.

We have exhausted the 25L grants budget we had set for the grants program last April. We are expecting to receive many more grant requests in the next few months, and estimate an overall deficit of INR 3-5L in the grants program.

Note that the mentioned figures include only the payments that happened post-April (some of these grants may have been approved earlier and received payments before April 2025).This also includes some disbursements from older grants that continued this FY. These funds are split across the following categories-

This supports our hypothesis that more than 80% of our grants budget is allocated towards direct FOSS funding through projects and fellowships ( which is 20% of the requests).

What’s next

We have received 10+ grant applications just in the last 2 months, some of which may get approved in early 2026. Our grants budget for the year is nearing a close, and we may hold on to some applications that come in the next few months until the next FY. We will take that time to catch up with grantees, discuss shortcomings and future plans, and continue working on other interesting programs we want to start this year.

I would also like to inform the community that starting Jan 2026, I will be working on “Maintainer Programs” at FOSS United Foundation.

Maintainer Programs

In May 2025, we launched Meet the Maintainers as part of Maintainers May. The idea was to highlight 31 FOSS maintainers from India for the entire month. While it sounds simple now, we weren’t very sure that we could find so many Indian maintainers when we started the campaign.

Sure enough, things got out of hand, and we found many more maintainers than there were days in the month. That led to forklore, a directory of Indian FOSS maintainers. And Meet the Maintainers never ended, we continue to bring you one story every week on #ForkloreFridays and have featured over 60 FOSS maintainers from India so far on forklore.

Many more Indians are now building FOSS, and this growth in maintainer activity is why we felt the need to expand our approach beyond financial support. The Maintainer Programs initiative by FOSS United Foundation will subsume grants, forklore.in, and other maintainer-adjacent programs and projects we’ve been running over the past. This is an effort to support Indian FOSS maintainers across the following areas:

1. Discoverability - Giving a platform to Indian FOSS projects and helping them find potential users, contributors, customers, hires, and even investors! We want to help these projects get more eyeballs through our events, social media channels, media coverage, etc. We will also help projects showcase at external events through sponsorships and travel grants.
2. Sustainability - This extends beyond the financial sustainability that the grants program offers. We will offer trainings for maintainers on security, accessibility, compliance, etc., and enable projects to conduct thorough audits regularly. We’ll also form partnerships with companies that can help us organise some of these trainings, provide infrastructure support (cloud credits) and hardware, join us as co-sponsors for grants, and more. All of this is crucial for long term sustainability of the projects.
3. Community - We will help these projects build their own communities, run FOSS contribution programs, and promote more interaction and knowledge sharing amongst the Indian maintainer community.

More updates on this will follow soon. These efforts will also be supplemented by the upcoming Grants Working Group. If you are a maintainer who has any ideas or thoughts, or a company that would like to partner with us, or just want to chat, please drop us an email at maintainers@fossunited.org.

Welcome to 2026. Turns out chabbis mein duniya isn't, after all, khatam.

Januarys are always a fun conflict, the energies of a new year and a fresh slate to do things, coupled with a touch of post-holiday blues. We at FOSS United are nevertheless back with new ideas, renewed momentum, and some room for the January blues.

Here's what's opening up, what to watch out for, and where you can get involved right now.

💜 Highlights from FOSS United

• FOSSHack 2026 Registration open!

  FOSSHack is back, and this year, we're doubling down on what actually works. Instead of a rushed weekend sprint, FOSSHack 2026 runs through March as a month-long, hybrid hackathon. Registrations are open!

  FOSSHack 2026

  …this is your moment to get in early.

• Forklore Chronicles: Stories from the Source

  Here's what we covered last month, stories from the trenches, maintainers to know, projects to save

  • Rethink DNS and Mohammed Hussain
  • Rethink DNS and Murtaza Aliakbar
  • Poorna and Mujeeb Rahman K
  • Twig and Shubham Kumar

  Get the project breakdown, contribution guides, and their FOSS villain origin story, because every maintainer has that moment when everything changed. Read the drama at forklore.in! Got a maintainer ready to spill? Add to the lore!

• New year, new grants page, same question: what FOSS are you building?

  The Grants homepage got a proper overhaul; it's clean and easier to navigate. With over ₹3 crores disbursed to date, everything from new programming languages to FOSS mirrors to developer tools. If your New Year's resolution involved building something or if you've been sitting on an idea waiting for the "right time", bad news, there's no right time. Good news, there's funding. Apply here.

• Blender but in Kannada??

  Two 14-year-olds, Advay and Aarav, are building a complete Blender tutorial series in Kannada because, apparently, they got tired of waiting for adults to do it. Six episodes covering modelling basics. Episode 1 and Episode 2 are already up, and they're better than half the English tutorials out there. Gen Alpha is building while we're still arguing about frameworks. If you know someone learning Blender, send this their way. Full details here. Oh, and among others, the project is supporting by FU Grants :)

Upcoming Events:

• You Bought It. Can You Break It? (Virtual) - 09 January 2026
• FOSS Meetup Chennai - 10 January 2026
• MangaloreFOSS 2026 - 17 January 2026
• FOSS Meetup Bihar - 17 January 2026
• FOSS Meetup Pune - 24 January 2026

To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, please visit the FOSS Events Timeline. Our community thrives on respect, inclusivity, and collaboration. Read our Code of Conduct.

From the Community Corner:

Projects

• Drawy: Your handy, infinite, brainstorming tool! The project has now moved to KDE Invent.
• Cosmic-epoch: Next generation Cosmic desktop environment
• Eclipse-theia: Eclipse Theia is a cloud & desktop IDE framework implemented in TypeScript.
• Gullak: A no-frills expense tracker app enabling quick logging of expenses in natural language, using LLMs for parsing and categorisation

News and more

• The Year in Books 2025 / TechPolicy Press
• Schleswig-Holstein Migrates 40,000 Mailboxes to Open-Source for Sovereignty
• Paris-Based 'Open Source Experience' Conference Hands Out 'Acteurs du Libre' Awards
• Zerodha 2025 Open-Source Report
• Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Review: Is This the Linux Distro of the Year 2025?
• MeitY Backs Mandatory AI Copyright Licensing Even As Tech Industry Bats For Lawful Access
• The Commit Company acquired by Frappe Technologies
• New Study Examines Features and Policies for 29 AI 'Undressing' Apps / Tim Bernard
• Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the GoI has released a White Paper on Democratising Access to AI Infrastructure
• Mumbai's Data Center Dreams Run on Coal and Inequality / TechPolicy Press
• India's New Data Protection Regime Could Fuel Metadata Surveillance / Rudraksh Lakra
• In The Age Of AI, The Promise Of A Feminist Internet / Saumya Kalia
• Nvidia is Building a Shield of Concentrated Power / Megan Kirkwood
• Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms / J. Nathan Matias, Avriel Epps

January is a moment to start: The FOSS ecosystem needs builders, not just watchers. Projects need maintainers. Communities need contributors. The question is: what are you going to ship this year?

Thanks for being with us through the holidays. See you next month.

Have thoughts on the newsletter? Reach out to us at team@fossunited.org

FOSS United. Strengthening the Indian FOSS ecosystem.

"May the FOSS be with you" 🚀

The December 2025 Governing Board (GB) call took place on Wednesday, 10 December 2025. In attendance were members of the board: Bowrna Prabhakaran, Nemo, Swastik Banarwal, Shree Kumar and Bodhish Thomas. They were joined by Poruri Sai Rahul from the FOSS United staff.

Instead of diving into the agenda, each of us took a few minutes to bring up points or topics that we would like to discuss, whether or not we were able to add them to the agenda ahead of time

1. Rahul brought up the 2026 strategy and the 2026 election cycle
2. Shree pondered over the fact that the GB has been slower than he originally anticipated
3. Nemo brought up the Grants Working Group Charter updates
4. Bowrna prompted us to try and answer the question, “we made this change that caused impact”
5. Bodhi sought reading material and guides on setting up a not-for-profit organisation in India, if possible, in the context of FOSS projects, and an impact framework that such organisations could adopt.

Working of the GB

Everyone agreed with Shree that the GB was slower than they had originally anticipated. Shree prompted again that establishing Working Groups could speed things up, but also noted that the timescales on which the GB was operating was months and quarters, and not weeks. Shree also prompted that the GB step up and run the monthly calls themselves. Shree will be taking the responsibility for coordinating, setting up, and leading the monthly call in January 2026. For context, a Foundation staff member has been involved in coordinating, organising, and note-taking for the GB calls since inception. Nemo also noted that there were topics that could be discussed without the need for the entire GB to be present, instances where no quorum was necessary, as decisions weren’t being taken. Echoing a similar idea from a few months back, more than one call per month with available members of the GB might be the path forward.

Regarding Bowrnas prompt, Shree pointed out that the GB arrived at the IndiaFOSS invited speaker policy after much deliberation and that the IndiaFOSS volunteer reimbursement policy was settled at a previous GB meeting. Rahul chose instead to reframe the question - as Individual Contributors (IC), we are accustomed to seeing the direct impact of our actions. But GB duties/impact are hard to judge from an IC perspective, as the GB duties are closer to people management. The GB is responsible for establishing and driving the culture of the FOSS United Community, so how do you measure a culture change? Culture change is experienced on the ground as ease of volunteering, ease of event organising, ease of grants decision-making, and so on, most of which aren’t directly experienced by the GB members themselves. This is “action at a distance”, and we’re dealing with timescales of months, if not years.

2026 GB Elections

Moving to the 2026 election cycle, Shree made an interesting proposal to shift the election cycle. In 2025, the election cycle started in January, the elections were held in March, and the results were announced on April 1. Shree proposed structuring the election cycle around the IndiaFOSS conference. For instance, in 2026, the election cycle would start 3 months before IndiaFOSS, say June/July, voting happens throughout September, and results are announced on Day 2 of IndiaFOSS 2026. The primary motivation behind this change was to increase voter turnout. In 2025, we had 400+ people vote in the elections, but in context, IndiaFOSS 2025 saw 2000+ people attend the event. We discussed how the increased spotlight on FOSS United/IndiaFOSS could help bring more eyeballs to the election, how we could engage with IndiaFOSS attendees about the election process and candidates running for GB on Day 1 of IndiaFOSS, how the outgoing GB could close Day 1 and the incoming GB could close Day 2, and so on. Nemo highlighted the risk of centring elections around the IndiaFOSS conference, for instance, what if IndiaFOSS doesn’t happen in a certain year, but he agreed that the benefits outweigh the risks. Bodhi recommended poking IndiaFOSS attendees about voting, and recommended that voting end on Day 1. The change passed with unanimous agreement.

2026 at FOSS United

Coming to the 2026 strategy, Rahul highlighted that there will be a renewed push for new Industry Partners in 2026. Swastik pointed out that the existing IP deck was outdated, and Rahul responded that updating the deck was on our to-do list. In fact, in addition to updating the deck, Rahul also pointed out the need to update the IP tiers and corresponding financial contributions, given the lack of new IPs over the past two years. Rahul also pointed out that at least one grant-giving organisation, similar to Samagata Foundation, had expressed interest in supporting FOSS United Foundation financially in the past, in addition to corporate Industry Partners. Nemo pointed out the need for a campaign to nudge companies to use an “entry-level employee” salary as a benchmark. Swastik pointed out that we could help potential/existing IPs establish OSPOs and/or help them contribute to the FOSS ecosystem. He also pointed out that a FOSS Award by FOSS United Foundation might be beneficial in our efforts overall. He will be looking into such an effort in the next quarter.

FOSSHack 2026

Rahul shared updates about the new FOSS Hack format for 2026 - a month-long hackathon instead of a 2-day hackathon. Bodhi highlighted that FOSS Hack winners could be better integrated into the FOSS United Community by giving them a 3-minute speaking slot at IndiaFOSS.

December was a quieter but productive month as we wrapped up the year amidst holidays and year-end slowdowns. The focus this month was largely on refinement, performance improvements, and laying early groundwork for FOSS Hack 2026, ensuring the platform enters the New Year in a more stable and maintainable state.

• FOSS Hack 2026 Page (#1337): Launched the initial landing page for FOSS Hack 2026 directly in the codebase. Keeping this page in-repo makes it fully open for community contributions and easier iteration over time.

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

• Ticketing Workflow Improvements (#1300, #1301):

  Event URLs are now more intuitive, with /tickets redirecting users to the correct Buy Ticket or RSVP page based on event type.

  Ticket purchases also gained flexibility, allowing custom fields to be collected per attendee or shared across all tickets useful for surveys and preference collection.

• Ticket Insights Enhancements (#1310, #1319):

  Ticket insights in the dashboard now include custom field data, grouped views, searchable lists, and CSV export.

  These improvements make it significantly easier for organizers to analyze attendee data, especially for larger events.

• RSVP Insights & Check-ins (#1327, #1328, #1343):

  RSVP insights were simplified internally for better reliability and performance.

  Organizers can now search RSVP responses, export filtered data as CSV, and manually check in attendees directly from the dashboard complementing the existing self check-in system.

• Event Page Refinements (#1304, #1321):

  Event descriptions now hide markdown comments from rendered views, keeping pages clean while still allowing inline editor notes.

  Event location previews were also improved using OpenStreetMap with better handling of missing or invalid map links.

• CFP & Review Workflow Improvements (#1309, #1312, #1339):

  Chapter members are now notified when approved proposals are withdrawn, helping organizers stay informed without manual tracking.

  Proposers also receive email notifications for new reviews or updated remarks. Additionally, reference link limits were increased to 250 characters, making it easier to include long documents and slide decks.

• Grants Directory Improvements (#1344, #1340):

  Grants directory updates are now more efficient, with manifests refreshing only when changes are detected reducing unnecessary server load.

  Alongside this, the grants pages received a visual redesign for better structure and consistency.

• Accessibility & Performance Enhancements (#1308, #1306):

  Continued improvements to keyboard navigation and ARIA labelling across dashboard and proposal pages, along with missing alt text added to images across the site.

  Searchable list views were also optimized using debounced search and caching to improve performance on large datasets.

  Credits: @grittyuffy and @ig-imanish

For more updates, please check out the CHANGELOG in the repo or on the documentation page.

You can catch up on Forklore updates here.

For more information and follow-up, please check our Project Dashboard.

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

Stay afresh everyone, and happy New Year! See you soon next year

This month, we're not sugarcoating things. New research confirms what we've all suspected: open source maintainer burnout isn't a personal failing, it's structural. Low pay, repetitive work, toxic behaviour, and endless responsibility are burning people out. But here's what's different: FOSS United is building the working groups, governance, and community infrastructure to actually fix this.

Here's what happened in 2025, what's threatening the ecosystem, and what we're doing about it.

💜 Highlights from FOSS United

• Governing Board: three working groups on the way

  • The November Governing Board meeting focused heavily on how we support the people who make and run things at FOSS United. The Board discussed:
  • A new Tech Working Group that will steer the direction of the FOSS United platform and infrastructure (self-hosted Jitsi, services, access policies, etc.).
  • A Grants Working Group to bring more structure, clarity, and expert input to funding decisions.

  • A DEI Working Group to look at who we endorse and who shows up at FOSS United events – with a focus on geography, accessibility, and representation.

    Read in detail here: Notes from November Governing Board

• GCPP Tech+Policy Batch 11 – last call for Early Bird (7 December) If you've been putting off your application to the GCPP Tech+Policy Course (Batch 11), this is your gentle nudge, scholarship available. A good pick if you want to strengthen your voice in tech-policy discussions.

  GCPP Scholarship!

• Maintainer burnout: research, reflection, and a structural problem

  This month, burnout in open source stopped being "that thing we all vaguely know about" and became something much more concrete: Psychologist Miranda Heath has published a 47-page report on burnout in open source communities, backed by interviews, literature review, and analysis of maintainers' writing. Miranda Heath research – and a companion blog from Open Source Pledge – argues that burnout is structural, not an individual failing: low or no pay, unglamorous maintenance work, toxic community behaviour, and hyper-responsibility all add up. Open Source Pledge+1

  You can read an opinionated summary a community member has posted on the forum, connecting the findings back to Indian maintainers and our own ecosystem.

• Debian is taking over Navi Mumbai this December!

  MiniDebConf is landing in the city with two days of workshops, packaging marathons, and plenty of hallway wisdom from seasoned Debian folks.

  When: 13–14 DEC
  Where: Remiges Technologies & SIGCE
  Sign up: MiniDeb Conf X FOSS United Mumbai

  If you've been meaning to dip your toes into Debian, this is the friendliest pool you'll find.

• Forklore Continues: Confessions from the Creators 📖

  Here's who joined the lore last month, projects worth bookmarking, and the maintainers behind them worth knowing:

  • Safedep and Abhisek Datta
  • HOT Tasking Manager and Ramya Ragupathy
  • Raven and Nikhil Kothari
  • Zaturn and Karthik Devan

  Find out what keeps them going, what lessons they have for their younger selves and what files in their repos they'd set on fire. Head to forklore.in now! Know someone who should be on this list? Add to the lore!

Upcoming Events:

• SciPi India Community Call #4 - 6 December 2025
• Climate Conscious Tech Workers: Turning the Tide from Within (Virtual) - 11 December 2025
• MiniDeb Conf X FOSS United Mumbai - 13 December 2025
• FOSS Meetup Mangalore - 14 December 2025
• FOSS Meetup Chennai - 20 December 2025
• DPDPA Learning - FOSSxPolicy (Virtual) - 20 December 2025

To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, please visit the FOSS Events Timeline. Our community thrives on respect, inclusivity, and collaboration. Read our Code of Conduct.

From the Community Corner:

Projects

• Open Desk: Organise, present, collaborate. All in one
• 15h.org: a resource for documentation and open source support for AMD's Family 15h (fam15h) and other related processors and platforms
• Mitosis: Write components once, run everywhere. Compiles to React, Vue, Qwik, Solid, Angular, Svelte, and more
• Shadcn/ui: A set of beautifully designed components that you can customise, extend, and build on
• Docling: Get your documents ready for gen AI

News and more

• Open source does not mean open to vulnerabilities / The Hindu
• 'Women Are Literally And Figuratively On The Outskirts Of The Startup Economy' / BehanBox
• Leadership update: Ankush as CTO of Frappe
• Inside India's Open-Source Revolution: FOSS, AI & The Digital Commons / AIM
• Global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year / Freedom House
• ‍MIB proposes bringing Influencers under press council Act
• This Thanksgiving, thank the maintainers…in style
• Introducing Copyparty, the FOSS file server
• Living In A Ghost World, These Data Workers Make the Internet Possible / BehanBox
• Dream Sports to open-source Dream11's tech stack to startups and MSMEs
• Mumbai's Data Center Dreams Run on Coal and Inequality / TechPolicy Press
• SIM binding mandatory for online messaging platforms: Dept of Telecom / Indian Express
• India's New AI Governance Plan is Much Ado About Nothing / TechPolicy Press
• OpenAI and Anthropic get sued for piracy: What are the real costs of AI? / Indian Express
• India's New IT Rules on Deepfakes Threaten to Entrench Online Censorship / TechPolicy Press
• Cartography of generative AI
• SFLC.in Hackathon 2025 wraps up with broad participation
• AI Safety for Fleshy Humans
• How American Big Tech guards the profits it extracts around the world / The Markup

Grants & opportunities

• ‍floss.fund, dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable FLOSS projects globally.
• ‍FOSS United Grants

December is a moment to reflect: The FOSS ecosystem that powers the internet is under stress. Maintainers are burning out. Platforms are being acquired. But there's also momentum for change. FOSS United is building the community. The question is: what role do YOU want to play in the rebuild?

Thanks for being with us through 2025. See you in the new year, rested, curious, and ready to build.

Have thoughts on the newsletter? Reach out to us at team@fossunited.org

FOSS United. Strengthening the Indian FOSS ecosystem.

"May the FOSS be with you" 🚀

November has been a month of significant feature additions! We've launched a Grants Funding Directory inspired by floss.fund, implemented RSVP self check-ins for better event management, and rolled out a complete Events Page redesign with v3.0 dark theme support. Event organizers now have powerful tools with Free Ticket management and Host Approval workflows.

• Events Page Redesign (#1265): The events page now sports the v3.0 design with dark mode support, improved event cards, better sponsor/speaker displays, and enhanced social links.

  Eg page: Mumbai minidebconf, Combatore foss

• Grants Funding Directory (#1283): Inspired by floss.fund, projects can now list their funding needs using a standardized funding.json manifest. The directory includes filtering, validation against the funding schema, and dedicated project pages. Visit fossunited.org/grants/directory to explore.

• RSVP Self Check-in System (#1286, #1287, #1288): Attendees can now check themselves in during events via their RSVP edit page. Organizers get a dedicated dashboard showing check-in data grouped by date with download capabilities. This replaces manual check-in workflows and provides better attendance tracking. For more info please check our docs [page](https://docs.fossunited.org/event-rsvp/#event-check-ins_.

  Note: This only applies for signed-in users who can edit their RSVP.

• Host Approval for RSVPs (#1282): Event organizers can now enable "host requires approval" for RSVP forms. This allows reviewing and accepting/rejecting RSVPs directly from the insights page with automated email notifications. Perfect for capacity-limited events.

Image showing RSVP check-in data and host approval workflow in RSVP insights dashboard

• Free Ticket Management (#1259, #1260): Complete free ticket workflow is now available in the dashboard. Organizers can create coupon codes, set redemption limits, track usage, and manage codes with proper permission controls. Recipients can claim tickets using the coupon without needing a platform account.

• Talk Licensing & Videos (#1268, #1266): CFP submissions now include talk licensing options with acknowledgment checkboxes. Schedule pages can link to recorded talk videos, making it easier for attendees to catch up on sessions they missed.

• First Commit Initiative (#1271): Launched dedicated page for the First Commit initiative at fossunited.org/first-commit.

For more updates, please check out CHANGELOG in the repo or in documentation page.

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Stay nerdy, Happy weekend :-)