I attended the Asia Pacific Youth Internet Governance Forum (October 3–4) and the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (October 4–7).

The IGF is a UN-convened forum where governments, companies, civil society and technologists discuss how the internet is run and used. This year’s APrIGF theme was “Safeguarding a Resilient Internet in Times of Crisis”; the youth summit’s was “From Users to Stakeholders: Youth Shaping Resilient and Rights-Based Digital Futures.”

The first few days at the youth summit gave me the opportunity to meet young people across Asia Pacific. Panelists, throughout the two days of sessions and activities, kept returning to tokenism. Young people can be represented on a panel without having any influence on the outcome. Participants also wanted follow-up after events like these, so they could see whether their input changed anything. The yIGF working document will be linked here when it’s public.

In a crisis-simulation exercise on AI and misinformation, my group had participants from Nepal, India, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. We worked out which institutions need to coordinate in an emergency and who is responsible for checking misinformation. We also looked at how badly written prompts can generate fear, and how generative AI might translate emergency messages faster and push them out as soon as an event happens. Ideas included localised servers for critical information, a system run by a larger body (most suggested the government) with local centres and a brief discussion of where open source fits. The latter was not discussed in detail and mentioned in passing. The local-centres idea was really about decentralisation, and “centres” could also mean people near the affected area. But most of the conversation assumed AI was a neutral tool, and we never asked whether the systems we were rooting for already existed. I wish we had spent more time studying how crisis governance actually works across the Asia Pacific.

I also attended “The Cost of a Click” by The Pranava Institute, and used their Unboxing Tech Toolkit [link] to map where the fastest internet servers sit. It asked where young people host public repositories, what that costs ecologically, and where the internet physically lands. It’s a useful corrective to treating “the cloud” or “open” as placeless.

A participant using Unboxing Tech Toolkit at APrIGF 2026

The session “Surveillance by Design: Digital ID, Data Protection and the Trust Crisis in South Asia” (by Factum and Aapti Institute) argued that South Asia is building digital ID and data systems faster than the laws meant to protect people from them. Surveillance gets designed into the architecture before any regulator looks at it, which makes it a problem. Open, auditable code makes oversight possible, but someone still has to do the auditing, and there has to be a legal route to act on what they find.

Lastly, Freedom Online Coalition moderated a panel which suggested the existing FOC members (India is not a part of it, yet) to engage with more country specific issues. Participants criticised blanket social media bans for youth, including in Nepal. They pointed out that shutdowns and surveillance against youth-led protests are not protection for young people. Participants also warned against selective multistakeholderism and English-only policy spaces, both of which can create a false sense of agency.

Threads to pick up:

• With Yash Aggarwal (founder of Public Policy India; Engagement Manager for South Asia at ICANN), I discussed whether open source could help school students understand policy. If the information is open, can students question policies and propose changes?
• Isabelle Lois, who is helping manage the AI Summit 2027 in Geneva, and I compared notes on scholarship processes, drawing on how IndiaFOSS ran its own. We agreed that AI research needs people from interdisciplinary backgrounds.
• October was Open Source Hardware Month, and I kept thinking about how to bring people and conversations from IGF meetups into makerspaces, and vice versa. This probably needs ideas from the Indian FOSS community and makerspaces themselves.
• Vatsla Srivastava, President of Internet Society India, Mumbai Chapter, was one of the fellows from India. I was excited to hear about Mumbai IGF, which had recently taken place in September.
  

Digital commons came up across panels as the default good. APrIGF brought together a lot of organisations, people and ideas about what the internet should be. Patan, where I was staying, offered a concrete version of the idea. It has shared courtyards and communal water spouts, spaces where work, travel and daily life overlap. They stay usable because people share responsibility for maintaining them. Digital commons work the same way. Internet governance is where many of the rules for those commons get decided.

(A few of) the participants of APyIGF 2026

Earlier this year, we gave a grant of INR 5 lakhs to VGLUG Foundation, the Villupuram GNU/Linux Users Group. It is a volunteer-driven non-profit community dedicated to educating students and rural youth in Tamil Nadu.

“This organization is a social movement that works towards enlightening the masses with the essence of free software and to liberate knowledge. Our main objectives are to take forward free software and its ideological implications to all corners of our country from the developed domains to the underprivileged.”    

- from vglug.org

In 2013, a group of volunteers in Villupuram, a district in northern Tamil Nadu, started meeting to talk about GNU/Linux and free software.They began by running weekend meetups and handing out GNU/Linux distributions to anyone in the district who wanted them.

VGLUG conducts open weekend tech meetups to equip rural youth with coding and analytical skills through FOSS technologies, and offer workshops for the general public to educate and to create awareness on virtual privacy, malwares, internet surveillance, cyber security, etc.

They run a FOSS training program for the underprivileged. The volunteers running the program are often part of previous cohorts. This year, 360 beneficiaries were selected, out of 1640 applicants. The beneficiaries included 14 parentless and 47 single parent candidates.

Under the training program, they run free courses on Android and Flutter development, React and Node.js, and, most recently, Python with GenAI, DevOps and cybersecurity. VGLUG has also run skill development and placement programmes with the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation. You can read more about these sessions here.

The Grant

We’re continuing our support for VGLUG Foundation with a grant of INR 5 lakhs this year. This goes towards supporting infrastructure and other operational costs for their ongoing FOSS training program.

If you’d like to support the training program, you can donate to the VGLUG Foundation directly by bank transfer or UPI. If your organisation has a CSR programme, you can reach out to VGLUG Foundation to explore CSR support. Anyone can join VGLUG’s meetups. You can find the group on its mailing list, Telegram, GitHub and YouTube, or read more at vglug.org.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project or community looking for support, please apply here. Find information about the grants program and previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing back to the ecosystem, please reach out to us at maintainers@fossunited.org.

The platform now runs on Frappe Framework v16, up from v15, on Python 3.14. The dashboard moved from frappe-ui 0.1.162 to its first stable 1.0 release. Both are large jumps, and both are mostly invisible for majority of users. If you use the site, you are unlikely to notice anything beyond things feeling a little quicker. Most of the change is in the desk, where our team and organisers manage events, and under the hood in how pages are built and served. Along the way we also moved the dashboard build to Vite 8 and swapped our pre-commit tooling for prek, which does the same job faster.

The nice outcome of all this: every piece of software listed on our stack page is now on its latest release. Staying current is a choice we have to make on purpose, because nobody else will make it for us. Falling a version or two behind is easy. Climbing back up later is the expensive part.

If the commit graph looks thin in a few places this month, that is festival season and some long-pending leave. The upgrades did not mind waiting.

On the IndiaFOSS side, the event photos are now up in an Ente album at indiafoss/2026/photos. The IndiaFOSS handbook, the guide we use to plan and run the event, now lives on docs.fossunited.org

Talk proposals got simpler to read and manage. The speaker details on a proposal used to be stored twice, once as personal information and once in the speakers list. We merged them into one place and tidied up how the speaker section looks. When a proposal's status changes, speakers now move to the right mailing list too, instead of staying on the "accepted" list after a talk is withdrawn. And if a call for proposals is set to keep speakers anonymous, the event page now respects that.

Single-use free ticket coupons are now tied to the email they were issued for, so a code shared around cannot be claimed by someone else. James Reilly worked on this, and also closed a small gap where two people claiming the last use of a coupon at the same moment could both get a ticket.

Profiles, event pages, RSVP pages and talk proposals now show proper preview images when you share their links, and profile previews carry Forklore and FOSS Hack badges.

Anas Khan went through every link on the site, all 934 of them, and fixed the ones that no longer worked. S Mayur fixed ticket PDF downloads, which were failing with an error. And a warm welcome to Ganesh (Vecto), who sent in their first contribution this month, a cleanup of our documentation links.

That is October. Quiet on the surface, a lot of moving furniture hammering underneath.

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

Framework & Dashboard Upgrades (#1866, #1851)

Frappe Framework v15 to v16 on Python 3.14, and frappe-ui 0.1.160 to 1.0.2. Also Vite 6 to 8 (#1860), prek replacing pre-commit (#1863), and the dashboard text editor moved to frappe-ui's new molecule Editor (#1864).

CFP Submissions (#1828, #1829, #1859, #1850)

Duplicate personal information section removed and merged into the speakers table, simpler speaker section, email groups sync on status change, anonymised CFPs hide speakers on the event page.

Free Ticket Coupons (#1795)

Single-use coupons are bound to their mapped email; usage count is race-safe. Credits: James Reilly.

OG Images (#1861, #1867)

Dynamic preview images for profile, RSVP, event and CFP pages, with Forklore and FOSS Hack badges on profiles. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Dead Link Audit (#1810)

934 URLs checked, dead ones repointed. Credits: Anas Khan.

Ticket PDF Download (#1804)

Fixed a 500 error on ticket PDF download. Credits: S Mayur.

Documentation (#1824, #1840)

IndiaFOSS handbook and logistics docs on docs.fossunited.org (credits: Siddharth), documentation link cleanup (first contribution from Vecto).

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, drop suggestions and issues at Git, hope you don't make a violation.

In May 2025, a proposal went up asking Maintainer Summit be an IndiaFOSS Pre-event.

What if we could get a group of maintainers in the room, to discuss problems and solutions around maintaining open-source projects.

Four months later, 60-70 maintainers showed up for the first Maintainer Summit, an IndiaFOSS pre-event, and covered a wall with sticky notes on sustainability, grants, burnout and security.

We hosted the second edition of Maintainers Summit on 25th September, ahead of IndiaFOSS 2026. Almost hundred maintainers attended the event at the Samagata Foundation in Bengaluru for a full day of unconference sessions.

There was no pre-set schedule. Everyone who walked in could write a topic on a sticky note and pin it to the board, under a time slot and a room. If you proposed it, you didn't have to run it.

Some basic ground rules at the event were :

1. Don’t hijack the discussion
2. If discussion goes on beyond the session time, take it elsewhere
3. Proposer is NOT the moderator//everyone is responsible for direction-setting
4. Law of two feet
5. Don’t start with intros, opinions first - reverse bollywood

We also tried something new this time. Attendees were asked to fill in the Open-Source Ecosystem Canvas to map where their projects sit, and a round of Maintainers Bingo as an icebreaker activity.

(the worksheet)

(the bingo)

By 10am, we began with the topics proposed by the attendees. The proposal board was filled with sticky notes full of discussion topics in minutes.

A few themes stood out. AI was everywhere: there was an Open Source AI roundtable (limited capacity, so it got a room of its own), along with sessions on what maintainers' repos look like in the AI era, how you grow co-maintainers when agents are sending PRs, and how much AI is enough.

Another asked what role open-source language communities should play in evaluating LLMs. People were just as curious about the human side of maintenance: how to find the right contributors and retain them, dealing with volunteer burnout, what comes after college clubs, and more. We talked about FOSS United grants, FLOSS/fund and funding for FOSS towards the end.

Across the rooms, the conversations kept returning to one question: what happens once information is made available? Open data can disappear or go private, and having more of it doesn’t mean we understand it better. When a weather website crashed during the Nepal floods, it showed how public infrastructure gets tested at the worst moment.

On India’s data protection law, we talked about consent, purpose limitation, and who is responsible when compliance is outsourced, and we left with open questions about AI agents and innovation. And with LLMs trained on open knowledge, the idea we carried out was availability versus agency.

What's next

We're continuing the Maintainer Meetups through the year, and if you maintain something in India, we'd love to have you on forklore.in.

Huge thanks to all the volunteers, the Samagata Foundation for hosting us, the sponsors, and everyone who showed up and pinned a note to the wall. See you at the next Summit.

If you're an organisation that wants to give back to the Indian FOSS ecosystem, or a maintainer looking for support, reach out to us at maintainers@fosusnited.org

The June 2026 Governing Board (GB) call took place on Thursday, 30 June 2026. These are the meeting notes and summary. The delayed publication of the notes is regretted. I’d like to thank Shree for reminding us. The primary discussion topic for the call was 2026 Governing Board elections. Bowrna, Shree, and Swastik were on the call, and Bodhish joined the call a little late, with Ashlesh, Vishal, and Rahul from the Foundation.

Governing Board Elections

1. Rahul started the conversation by reminding the GB members that we discussed the possibility of a few GB members stepping down after 1 year, and a few continuing for a 2-year term, to ensure that elections can be held every year while also maintaining continuity and to ease onboarding of newly elected GB members. Rahul then opened the floor, asking the existing GB members whether any of them considered stepping down this year.
2. Shree stepped up and noted that he would like to not continue. He still intends to be involved with the community, and he believes that his time is better spent volunteering than as a member of the GB. He noted that the GB is slightly ahead of its time and that community development is lagging. He volunteers in multiple places within the FOSS United ecosystem, e.g., Co-chair of IndiaFOSS 2026, and that splitting attention across activities is hurting long-term. Given his experience in the inaugural GB, he also believes that he can hold the GB accountable going forward as a member of the community.
3. Bowrna then noted that after speaking with the Staff, she has a better understanding of the gap between what the staff does at FOSS United and what she knows. She believed that she could help with strategy as a GB member, but she noted that maybe working at the grassroots is where she finds joy.
4. Swastik noted that having just graduated and starting a new job, he has decided to step down and focus on his career. His work requires a fair amount of travel, and he isn’t sure whether he will be able to take the regular calls required of the GB.
5. Bodhi also believes he wasn’t able to add much value and didn’t do justice to the role. He noted that he was open to stepping down, and that new people will want the opportunity to work and contribute via the GB. Bodhish believes that FOSS United can serve as a support system for FOSS projects, especially when they attempt to establish communities and/or organizations. A playbook for sustainable project growth will be invaluable to the broader ecosystem, and FOSS United is uniquely positioned to help create and maintain this playbook. Bodhish and the Open Health Care Project recently went through the process of setting up a Section 8 not-for-profit Foundation in India, and he noted that there were a lot of papercuts involved in this process, and that he’s coming across more folks in the Indian FOSS ecosystem who are facing similar challenges.

Structure and term of GB

1. We also discussed terms for GB members - 2 years or 4 years, with the possibility of stepping down after 1 year in both cases.
2. Bodhish noted that it’s very hard to work on non-profits while working full-time, so it’s good to maybe have 4-year terms with the possibility of moving on after 1 year.
3. Shree, on the other hand, noted that he prefers 2 year terms, with the choice of stepping down after 1 year. He noted that 4 years is a long-time, especially in the AI age and the turmoil that the FOSS ecosystem is going through. Shree also noted that 4 years is a long commitment, which might put off people from even running for the GB in the first place.
4. Bowrna noted that 1 year seems very short, and that it takes time to understand what the GB does and what the GB is capable of. 10-15 calls per year, roughly one per month, means that the learning curve is steep and the progress can be slow.
5. In the end, we agreed that Governing Board members are elected for a 2 year term, and they can choose to step down after 1 year. Governing Board members can be re-elected after their 2-year term, but they can only serve for a maximum of two contiguous terms.
6. Vishal noted that the FOSS United Foundation is different now compared to even one year ago, and that maybe next year the GB members are able to see the change they are working towards. The first year helps GB members understand, and the second year helps them “deliver” and “lead”. With 1 or 2 members elected every year, starting 2026, not everyone in the GB will be starting from scratch, and they have earlier GB members to rely upon for advice, guidance, and institutional memory.

Logistics of Elections

Regarding who can run for the GB,

1. Shree noted that it will still be useful to have at least one student represented in the GB.
2. Bodhish doubled down on the need for senior folks, with significant experience in the FOSS/Digital Commons ecosystems, and have the long-term success of the Foundation in their mind. He also warned about the possibility of gaming community elections like that of FOSS United.
3. Vishal also noted that experience is necessary to ensure that GB members are able to bring new and pragmatic ideas to the table. It’s worth noting that experience and age aren’t the same thing, especially given that we run into college students with 4 or more years of FOSS contribution experience.
4. But Shree also noted that most college students understand how drastic the transition from college to a working environment can be, and therefore have difficulty actually living up to the expectations of GB members.

Finally, we discussed the election process itself.

1. The tech we used for the previous election was universally dismissed - noting that people weren’t even aware of everyone on the ballot, because of bad UX. The situation was especially worse on mobile devices.
2. The previous platform might have also unfortunately filtered out people who might have been ideal for the GB due to bad UX.
3. Everyone also noted that anyone who is running for the election should be a regular member of the Indian FOSS community, and that FOSS United should consider engaging with them even after the elections are over.
4. Our next steps involve putting together a timeline for the elections, creating a template for community members to submit nominations, and deciding on a platform for nominations and for the election itself.

Miscellaneous

1. Finally, unrelated to the elections, Shree asked about the status of the Annual report, and Swastik asked when the financial plan for FY 2026-27 would be published online. Shree also noted that the messaging on the website doesn’t pull in volunteers. Our grants work also feels too software-focused, and that we aren’t making it clear the breadth of domains that we support via our grants.

IndiaFOSS 2026 · Diversity Scholarship report

IndiaFOSS is a festival of open source and digital commons, and we want it to belong to everyone who cares about them. The Diversity Scholarship is how we make sure that cost, distance or background don't decide who gets to be in the room. It covers the festival ticket, and travel and stay where needed, for people from groups that are under-represented in open source. This report looks at who applied, who we supported, where the money went and what we'll do differently next year.

1. 93% of applicants asked for travel support. We reimbursed travel for 30 scholars.
2. 1 in 4 scholars is from a religious or ethnic minority. Among applicants it was 1 in 8.
3. 10 T4GC fellows, 14 FOSS Clubs reps and 7 city chapter reps were part of this year's scholars.
4. We checked travel claims against standard train fares. Travel reimbursements came to ₹1,28,227.25 for 30 scholars, which gave us more room to support more people.
5. Next year we'll open applications with the CFP, shorten the handbook, and ask every scholar for the same basic details so we can tell whether our DEI work is making a difference.

Who applied

Each dot is one application. The coloured dots show how many applicants fit each description.

Who the scholars are

Most scholars were students (54 of 65), and nearly half were women. Among them were 14 FOSS Clubs reps, 3 FOSS Clubs committee members and 7 city chapter reps. 49 of the 65 answered the questions about which groups they belong to. 21 of them ticked two or more.

What scholars told us about themselves

These questions were optional, and anyone could choose not to answer. 49 of our 65 scholars answered them. The rest either opted out, or joined through our communities and partners where we collected less information. So the percentages below are out of the 49 who answered, except for women, which is out of all 65 scholars. People could tick more than one box, so the numbers don't add up to 100%.

All 65 scholars

Each dot is one scholar, shown three ways.

Where scholars came from

How we ran it

We shared the call on social media, newsletters, the forum, FOSS Clubs and city chapter groups, with past scholars, and by word of mouth.

Applications opened on 15 June and closed on 7 August. We sent decisions on 18 August, 38 days before the festival, and scholars had until 23 August to confirm. We held a welcome call on 11 September and a prep call on 22 September. The scholar orientation was on 25 September, the first day of the festival.

8 reviewers went through the applications together online, using a shared rubric. We first checked whether each application was eligible. Then we scored it on four things: need, motivation, contribution to open source or community, and how consistent the application was. Students got priority over working professionals. There was no fixed amount per person. It depended on distance and need, and we checked travel amounts against standard train fares for each region. Every acceptance email said whether it covered travel, stay or only the ticket.

Every scholar got a festival ticket. We also covered travel and stay where needed, as far as the budget allowed.

Where the money came from, and where it went

Our institutional sponsor has committed to support the scholarship for three years, and this is the second year. How much the public fund drive raises decides how many more people we can bring.

Payment gateway fees and GST on income: ₹2,368. This includes GST.

Travel covers 30 scholars. Stay covers 31 scholars for three nights. Every one of the 65 scholars got a festival ticket, which costs ₹3,000.

Three years of the scholarship

Applications have almost tripled since 2024, while the number of scholars has stayed around 60. Each year we've also learned more about who our scholars are. We collect this information carefully, every question has a way to opt out, and we use it only to check whether the scholarship is reaching the people it's meant for.

Year by year

In 2024 we counted women only. This year the form has an option for women and non-binary people. LGBTQIA+ and disability weren't recorded in 2024.

Scholars by state

What we said we'd do last year

Four things we promised in the 2025 report, and where each one stands.

• ✓ Write a Diversity Scholarship Handbook. Done. It covers selection criteria, cost limits and documentation steps. Scholars said it's too long, so we'll add a short summary.
• ✓ Confirm scholars at least a month before the event. Done. We sent decisions 38 days before.
• ~ Open applications with the CFP and review on a rolling basis. Partly. We reviewed on a rolling basis, but opened applications a little after the CFP.
• ✓ Send a feedback survey to scholars. Done.

In their words

26 scholars said they'd be happy to write about their time at the festival, and 10 more said maybe.

8 scholars have filled in the feedback form so far. All of them said the handbook was too long and a short summary of the important points would help. 4 of them didn't know there were mentors at the event for them.

“As a first-time attendee, I got to explore many interesting projects, learn new things, and discover projects I would like to contribute to. It was a really useful experience for me. Nothing was unclear or difficult for me. Everything was explained properly in the document. I missed both in person meetups because I was an Audi-1 volunteer on both days.”

Juned Pinjari, IndiaFOSS 2026

“Halls were jam packed, could feel the Open Source in the Air and it was a great experience talking to new people and having new experiences too! The Panel Discussion on the second day where they Discussed about the current job market situation, it gave me hope and closure that I am not alone who is facing the music but it is alot of people too. I was not aware of the diversity scholar meetups, :') I just went in blind and had a good time nonetheless”

Praneel Sindhole, IndiaFOSS 2026

“About the stay was not confirmed where and when so if next time it's know a bit earlier would be helpful everything else was perfect. In person couldn't meet any diversity scholars as I didn't knew where it was held until it was over”

Shibin Eugin, IndiaFOSS 2026

“I lost my tickets which was required for reimbursement , could you all find a different way for ppl like me to get the reimbursement , cuz while travelling its really common to loose things often. Yes , I attended Security Devroom , where there was a talk which was purely hardware stuff and me being a software person the talk made me curious and interested in hardware and now I have a arduino Uno Q where I am trying to run k3s on it and I find it interesting . Also I met lot of folks and did networking with them and my perespective about tech keeps changing and getting updating , if not this conf I would have not gotten to to meet so diverse kind of ppl and network with them , Thank you FOSS United ”

Varsha U N, IndiaFOSS 2026

"Everything was clear avout the scholarship. I attended the one on the first on 26th september.We clicked a picture it was very new to me to meet new people.The second day i didnt check the telegram group. I feel like instead of a telegram group alerting us with the updates we could use something within the foss website or a whatsapp . I was really into gooey.ai's project because i myself was building something similar so talking to them gave me new ideas to go about with my project."

Anonymous Feedback, IndiaFOSS 2026

"Tangled was amazing booth also juspay new open source tech was really good. I attended in person meetup, met Ruchika and Garvit sharma."

Naman Jain, IndiaFOSS 2026

What we'll do differently in 2027

Two things matter most: starting earlier, and having good information about every scholar, however they came to us.

Start earlier

1. Open applications when the CFP opens, review them as they come in, and send every decision one to two months before the festival.
2. Grow the public fund drive so we can support more people.

Clearer information for scholars

1. Put the handbook on the application page, with a one-page summary, fare benchmarks and what we do and don't reimburse.
2. Record the online scholar sync and share notes after. Many scholars missed it and didn't hear about the meet-ups and mentors.
3. Publish notes from the Diversity Scholars meet, with attendance.
4. Confirm stay details earlier and share updates somewhere other than just Telegram.

Better data

1. Ask every scholar to fill in the same form, including those who come through partners or our communities. This helps us see if we're making progress, including on things a headcount can't show.
2. Make demographic and location questions required, each with a "Prefer not to say" option.
3. Add optional questions on first-time attendance and household income. Several applicants brought these up themselves.
4. Send the feedback form a day or two after the event, and share what we learn.
5. Improve the application and feedback forms.

The elections for the 2026 Governing Board took place alongside IndiaFOSS 2026. Three members of the inaugural board were stepping down. For the three open spots, we had 10 excellent candidates from the community who put their names in the hat. (You can check out all the candidates here.)

About 1131 people participated in the voting process, 985 cast their votes, and about 146 people abstained. With no further delays, meet the 2026 Governing Board!

1. Dr. Mohit P. Tahiliani is an Associate Professor at NIT Karnataka, with 18 years in FOSS. Member of the ns-3 Steering Council, GSoC mentor for 10 consecutive years. He wants to help students become long-term contributors and unlock funding for FOSS projects. Full profile.
2. Ashutosh Pandey is a compiler engineer who has spent the last 7 years building various communities, meetups, and the ecosystems to sustain them. He’s been involved in 50+ Hackathons in some or another capacity (participant, mentor, organizer, jury). Full profile.
3. Ramya Ragupathy has been involved in open source for over a decade in humanitarian tech. Starting from early roots as a backend contributor, she is currently associated with two non-profits in the FOSS4G space, supporting product management, community engagement, and operations. Full profile

They join the existing Governing Board members, Bodhish Thomas and Bowarna. We’d like to thank Shree, Nemo, and Swastik for all of their time and effort throughout their terms as part of the inaugural Governing Board.

About the Elections:

For elections this year, we followed the STAR voting method, where people rate each candidate on a scale. To conduct the elections, we used the Better Voting platform. Out of ~25k eligible voters, only 1131 participated in the voting process.

1. Results and stats
2. Announcement and logistics thread
3. Nominations thread

Stay tuned for more updates. You can always reach out to the GB at governing-board@fossunited.org.

I’ve been involved in the design works for IndiaFOSS for the last four years. Every year, as the conference grows both in scale and ambition, the designs had to adapt and grow along with it.

This year we had around 8-10 volunteers contributing to the design work for IndiaFOSS. This is a collection of my experiences, observations, and learnings from managing and contributing to the design of IndiaFOSS 2026.

It starts much before the conference

The design work for IndiaFOSS usually begins around seven months before the actual event, with the first announcement post and a makeshift webpage.

From there, things gradually start taking shape. The website gets built out with more information, while decks, devrooms, pre-events, calls for proposals, and social media campaigns start coming together in parallel.

The designs evolve every year with better UX, more colours, new visual directions, more devrooms, and more content to communicate. There are always things that could have been done better, and that is part of the process. Some imperfections are only discovered once people actually use what we’ve built. Those become lessons for the next year.

The Visual language

The early stage is when we start thinking about the larger visual language ie., themes, patterns, illustrations, colours, and how everything can come together as one identity.

This is where having more design volunteers becomes valuable. It isn’t just about having more people to execute designs, it gives us more people to brainstorm with and explore different directions and build on each other’s ideas.

This year the initial visual direction was built around an interlocking pattern that complemented the IndiaFOSS logo.

If you want to go deep on the idea: an interconnected ecosystem of individual pieces coming together, connecting with one another, and forming something larger. which can relate to the FOSS ecosystem with communities and people coming together contributing and building collectively.

Devrooms get their own identity

Devrooms have become an important part of IndiaFOSS. This year, we had 8 fully packed devrooms.

Last year, one of the recurring issues we heard from attendees was that devrooms were difficult to find and weren’t promoted enough. So this year, we decided to give them much more visibility.

But this time we decided to go for fully branding the devrooms, giving each one its own color and pattern. Ritika created a set of beautiful patterns that represented each devroom and helped distinguish them from one another.

The idea was to make devrooms easier to recognise across the website, social media, and eventually at the venue itself.

Social media: from announcements to 145+ sessions

Social media is one of the biggest ongoing design efforts throughout the months leading up to the event. In the early stages, the posts are mostly about calls for proposals for talks, devrooms, workshops, booths etc. As the event gets closer, the focus shifts towards ticket announcements, proposal reminders, devroom announcements, and eventually the individual sessions and speakers.

This year, we had around 145+ sessions and 160+ speakers, and every session went out as an individual social media post. Muneer and Amit built a tool to help generate the speaker posts, which made the process considerably easier. Muneer handled the styling and design system for talks across the different categories and tracks.

But there were still several manual steps involved, especially when it came to speaker images. The images used in the posts needed their backgrounds removed, the head positioned close to the centre, the empty space above the head reduced, and the final image cropped to a 1:1 ratio. Some images simply weren’t usable and had to be requested again from speakers.

It may sound like a small task, but doing this for more than 160 speakers becomes a significant amount of work. These tasks required a lot of hands and effort from Koushik, Ritam, Jyoti, Anvar, Arup, Shraavya

There was also an issue reported with AI being used to process some of the images, where the output altered the speaker’s facial features. (this has been addressed and will be corrected next year)

Beyond speaker posts, the entire team contributed to the social media designs throughout the conference cycle. And, of course, good copy makes good design work even better. Ashlesh, Ananya, and Sadhana contributed some great copy along the way.

Maintaining a consistent IndiaFOSS visual language was something I paid a lot of attention to. I regularly reviewed the designs and made necessary changes and refinements to ensure that, even with different people working on different pieces, everything still felt like part of the same IndiaFOSS identity.

Finding our way around

Venue mapping continues to be one of those things we’re “still figuring out”. This year, however, the mapping and directions were significantly better than last year.

Shree Kumar created an entire map of the NIMHANS Convention Centre to scale. Ritika then built a version of that map with important locations marked out. We also worked on improving physical wayfinding with direction boards, clearer signage, and signs placed outside individual halls and rooms. There were still a few hiccups, but each of them is useful feedback for the next iteration.

James also built an AI-generated offline-first IndiaFOSS conference companion app that brought together the venue map, schedule and a few other features. I think there is a lot of potential here for next year. It’s already open to contributions and feedback.

More on how we went with signages:

The signage system this year was largely shaped by feedback from the previous edition. Some of the recurring issues were:

1. People couldn’t easily find devrooms.
2. Audi 3 felt too remote and difficult to locate.
3. The internal route to the Food Area was closed, but the alternative route was less obvious

To understand the venue better, Shree, Ritika, and I visited the venue a couple of times and took a lot of photos and videos. We then mapped out the different points where signage would actually be useful.

We broadly divided them into three categories:

1. Wayfinding signage: helps people understand which direction to go.
2. Location signage: clearly identifying halls, rooms, and other spaces.
3. Maps: giving people an overall view of the venue and helping them understand where they were.

Every hall and room were marked on the maps with clear signage placed outside of each one.(There was a confusing part that we changed Audi to Hall, this we will revert back next year)

Wayfinding signs were placed immediately after the entrance and also 2 other spots where people needed guidance towards specific areas.

The food area was clearly marked on the maps and more people used the exterior route.

There were a few practical constraints we had to work around:

1. The signs cannot be stuck onto painted walls.
2. The setup needed to be affordable and reusable.
3. The signs had to be elevated enough to be clearly visible and accessible to people.
4. They needed to be strong and rigid enough without falling or getting blown over.

The solution we came up with was a standing tripod with holders that could support signboards up to around six feet tall. The solution we came up with was a standing tripod with holders that could support signboards up to around six feet tall.

For the actual boards, we printed the designs on wallpaper sheets and pasted them onto 5mm foam boards, sized 2×4ft.

This overall modularity made it easy to replace the printed sheet whenever we needed a different piece of information like a schedule, a devroom poster, or another directional sign.

This full setup costs just below Rs.2000 per signage unit. In this we would only need to replace a 400rs printed sheet if needed to reuse in future events.

(Unfortunately, we couldn’t get few of the tripods delivered on time, so we had to switch to pinning boards at the venue)

Merch: design becomes something you can wear

Merch is always something we discuss collectively, both among the design volunteers and the wider team.

This year, instead of asking everyone to work towards one pre-defined direction, volunteers were encouraged to explore their own ideas. That gave us a nice variety of visual directions to choose from.

But good merch isn’t always about the visual design, some creative copy is what makes it more special. For this year, the line we eventually went with was:

“What we build, builds us.”

Thanks to Ritika, James and Ashlesh for helping bring that one together. (and Tyler Durden)

Ritika also came up with the idea and design for:

“Give me a terminal & I shall move the world.”

which made its way onto the hoodies.

There were plenty of other cool merch ideas contributed by Ritam, Jyoti, Anvar, Koushik, and Arup.

Selvaganesh also created some really cool sticker designs that, unfortunately, we couldn’t get printed this time. He also put together a great promo video for the event.

I have seen Rahul replace his 3rd water bottle after covering it almost entirely with stickers. So I suspect that may have been his main motive to pitch the idea for a sticker bomb (a collage made from logos of different FOSS communities and projects.) Unfortunately, we had to drop that idea because of time and task constraints. Maybe next year.

I also want to mention Aditi and Mathura from PaperCraneLab. They set up a participant activity where people could pick a sticker, customise it, and add it to a long roll of paper. Over time, the roll turned into a visual record of everyone’s participation, almost like a live, collaborative data visualisation. It was a simple but really engaging way for participants to leave their mark on the event.

Growing the design team

One of the biggest changes this year was the size of the design team. Last year, we had 4 people. Before that it was not more than 2 or 3. This year, around 8-10 volunteers contributed, with a majority of them being beginner designers.

That made delegation a critical part of the process. It meant learning how to communicate clearly, assign tasks based on people’s strengths, review work, and give feedback while still giving everyone enough room to explore.

It worked both ways. I had to be open to ideas different from mine, and the volunteers also had to sometimes let go of ideas that didn’t fit the larger visual direction. Finding that balance between creative freedom and consistency is something I’m still learning, and there’s definitely a lot we can improve on next year.

What comes next

IndiaFOSS keeps getting bigger, and that naturally means the design problem keeps getting bigger too. There are still plenty of things we haven’t perfected; better venue navigation, more efficient content production, smoother volunteer workflows, better accessibility and reducing some of the repetitive manual work involved in preparing assets.

But that is also what makes working on IndiaFOSS interesting. Every year gives us a new set of problems to solve. And every year, the community grows a little bigger, the team gets a little stronger, and the design gets a little better.

A huge thanks to everyone who contributed this year. Not just to the visual design, but to the countless small tasks that make the whole thing work. And a special thanks to Vrinda and Siddharth for smoothly managing the volunteers and following up on every little bit of the event.

IndiaFOSS is not designed by one person. It is designed by everyone who contributes to making it happen. Reach out to us at indiafoss@fossunited.org or me at jeswin@fossunited.org if you are interested in volunteering for designs for IndiaFOSS or for the wider community.

The live page did double duty while the event was on: alongside the stream, it also showed a live schedule of what was happening in each hall and auditorium, so you could glance at it and know where to be. Post event, the page now shows just the recorded links.

If you want the numbers behind the stream, there's a forum thread on the livestreaming and recording. And general feedback on the event, the kind we read closely for next year, is collecting in this thread.

The devrooms got their final pass this month too, each devroom page (like AOSP) now matches the overall theme and pulls its schedule dynamically instead of being hand-updated. Awards are announced, final stats are up, and if you want to see what the community itself wrote about the event, there's now a log page that aggregates blog posts people published on their own. We went through the feedback thread and pulled together a working list of everything people shared, that's the seed for the log page, and it'll keep growing as more writeups come in.

One thing we tried and dropped: we looked at setting up Libredesk to handle event-time support queries at support.fossunited.org. The learning curve was a bit and in the spirit of time the idea faded away.

Now, the part I promised would be a little funny, and is also the part we need to actually fix. The site went down on day one. We host on Frappe Cloud, and their compute allowance got consumed fast: bumped from 8 hours to 12 at 2 PM, then 12 to 16 at 7:30 PM, and we still ran out around 9:30 PM. The cause wasn't exotic, every registration-desk volunteer's check-in scanner was hammering the checkins table directly, with no caching in between. It is, in hindsight, a very predictable way to run out of compute on the one day it matters most. Worth fixing properly before next year.

Which brings me to a one-year-later note. Last year's September 2025 report announced a QR scanner for ticket check-ins (#1147). That exact feature ran IndiaFOSS 2026 completely untouched, same code, one year later. Given the day-one outage above, the performance side clearly needed attention. The UI could use some bias too. Both are nominal work for 2027.

On the lighter side of new pages: indiafoss/2026/parallel lists all the pre-events and parallel meetups happening around IndiaFOSS 2026, and it has a genuinely nice touch, a dynamic map built on Protomaps PMTiles over Leaflet and OpenStreetMap data, styled with a Carto basemap.

On the platform itself: ticket transfers got a real rework this month. You can now approve a transfer directly from a link emailed to you, no login required, using a one-time approval token, and the error messages across the whole flow stopped showing raw backend exceptions. There's an open proposal for taking this further with signed tickets and a proper claim-hold-release flow, worth a read if you're curious where this can be headed: RFC #1794.

Free ticket coupons also got more trustworthy this month, organisers can now see a full breakdown of coupon stats per event, including whether a tier's coupon includes a t-shirt, so the numbers you see on the dashboard actually match what people claim at the door.

Security work continued in the background too, a few more endpoints hardened, a few more Bruno API tests added so regressions get caught automatically going forward. One of those fixes briefly broke chapter organisers' ability to check in attendees on someone else's behalf, caught and fixed within the same month.

Now, the technical (TLDR) list for those who like concise matter.

IndiaFOSS 2026

Live stream self-hosted on MediaMTX at (stream.fossunited.org), run by Jasil and the streaming team. Devrooms, awards, stats, and a new log page aggregating community blog posts all live. Parallel events page with a Protomaps/Leaflet/Carto map. Site had a day-one outage from Frappe Cloud compute exhaustion, traced to uncached check-in traffic.

Ticket Transfer Overhaul (#1786, #1787)

Guest-friendly approval tokens for transfers, no login required; friendlier error messages throughout. RFC #1794 proposes signed tickets and a claim-hold-release flow next.

Free Ticket Coupons (#1779)

Per-event coupon breakdown, including t-shirt inclusion per tier, plus fixes to keep claim counts accurate.

Security

Continued endpoint hardening with new Bruno API test coverage (#1722, #1724, #1725).

Schedule Page Fixes

BOF and Invited Talk session types, Markdown schedule descriptions, better mobile speaker photos, finer time-grid intervals.

Orderless Search (#1748)

Proposal and speaker search now matches regardless of word order.

Accessibility (#1733)

Ticket registration progress bar now has an accessible name. Closes #1696. First contribution from Prakhar Pandey.

Developer Experience (#1767, #1768, #1797)

Local dev setup is now fully self-bootstrapping, with realistic demo seed profiles. First contribution from S Mayur.

Other

Ticket purchase trend charts for organisers (#1766), a custom 404 page (#1791), and a first-timers guide for IndiaFOSS (#1764).

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, drop suggestions and issues at Git do you want us to be on tangled as well?

Go verify (y)ours by: https://spf.access.nu/

Once that was fixed, we internally setup two small pieces of infrastructure we now depend on daily. We self-host Miniflux for our internal RSS reading (only few use, I'm one heavy user), replacing whatever scattered bookmarks we were using before, and alongside it, Umami for analytics, watching traffic on Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the rest of the FOSS United network without handing that data to a third party. Both are the kind of quiet, unglamorous tools that make the rest of the work possible.

Speaking of quiet, unglamorous work: this month's biggest project was accessibility, and it deserves more than a passing mention.

We started a focused audit of the IndiaFOSS 2026 pages and their neighbours, as a slice of the larger accessibility effort tracked in #786. The stats page, the talks archive, booths, pre-events, and the devrooms are done for this round. The schedule page, the CFP form, proposal details, and ticketing are still on the list. I have been going through pages with a screen reader (Orca, on Linux) to check whether things actually make sense when spoken aloud rather than just looking right on screen, and Rahul has been working through tabbing order and keyboard navigation across the same pages. Reading a page with your eyes closed teaches you things that reading a design mockup never will.

We also got real help from outside the core team. Gauri found that the Schedule page has low-contrast UI that fails WCAG AA (#1707), and Amith Biju traced a progress-report issue back to a frappe-ui component that needs an upstream version bump to fix many accessibility issue over dashboard properly (#1696). Both are exactly the kind of finding that is easy to miss from the inside and obvious once someone points it out. If you use assistive technology and hit something that does not work right on any FOSS United page, please open an issue. One report per page is enough to help us prioritize.

On the product side, one addition We've afresh is My Tickets page. If you have ever bought a ticket to a FOSS United event and then lost the confirmation email, or wanted to check whether you are registered for something six months from now, this page is for you. Log in, and it shows every ticket tied to your account, split into upcoming and concluded, each with its QR code ready to go, and a direct download and calendar button. Small thing, long overdue.

Jobs, clubs, and the events timeline all picked up a list view this month, next to the existing grid, so you can scan them the way that suits you, credit to Siddharth Bansal (@sidd190) for that work. He also spent time hardening our ticket and check-in endpoints after a security audit, his first real dive into the fossunited codebase after joining last month.

The CFP form also grew some organiser-facing flexibility: event organisers can now override session types, categories, and speaker-field requirements to fit their own event, rather than being stuck with one global shape for every CFP on the platform. And there is a small but appreciated addition for attendees: events can now say plainly whether lunch, coffee, or nothing is provided, so nobody has to wonder or ask around.

Two more things worth a line each. The devroom pages got a design tweak with a themed pattern now running through the listing and each page, keeping them visually compact and consistent. And workshops, booths, the FOSS Awards page, and pre-events all went live for IndiaFOSS 2026, each managed the same way, directly through Frappe's page tooling rather than a code deploy. It is a good reminder that not everything that ships this month is a pull request.

Last thing: we started a weekly reading session as a team, going through resources on codebase practices and better software habits. We will start sharing what we read here, so keep an eye out next month.

Here's what we read for this month:

• https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.html (ngl its huge load)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIPbE7BssOs
• https://mtlynch.io/code-review-love/
• https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/ & https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-2/
• https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck
• https://www.simplermachines.com/lets-not-call-it-tech-debt-its-just-mess/
• https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/

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

Accessibility Audit (#786)

IndiaFOSS 2026 and neighbouring pages audited this round: stats, archive (list/speakers/talk), booths, pre-events, devrooms. Fixes for tabbing order, sponsor-tier announcements, and misc a11y issues on the archive and dashboard. Pending: schedule, CFP form, proposal details, ticketing.

My Tickets Page

New /my-tickets page shows every ticket bought by the session user, grouped into upcoming/concluded, with cached QR codes, calendar, and download buttons.

Visit -> https://fossunited.org/dashboard/my-tickets

List/Grid Views (#1650, #1663, #1664)

List view toggle added to jobs, clubs, and the events timeline. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Visit: https://fossunited.org/jobs, https://fossunited.org/events/timeline, https://fossunited.org/clubs

Security Hardening (#1704)

Ticket and check-in endpoints hardened following an internal audit. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Order Revalidation (#1698)

Orders are revalidated before fulfillment; refunds lock before the Razorpay call; automatic refunds removed per the no-refund policy. First contribution from Anas Khan.

CFP Form Customization (#1727, #1726)

Organisers can override session types, categories, contact-info visibility, and speaker-photo requirement per event. The CFP form now shows an event's own description as its guideline text, falling back to the global one only when unset.

Ticketing & T-shirts (#1712, #1716, #1695)

Free ticket coupons can include a t-shirt; volunteer forms can ask for size; events can declare a catering option (none / lunch / coffee).

Infrastructure: Email Delivery

Fixed missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records on fossunited.org. Full story linked above.

Self-Hosted Tools

Miniflux for internal RSS reading; Umami for analytics across Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the FOSS United network.

Fixes

Ambiguous link text across docs and web pages fixed (#1697, first contribution from saksham mishra); underlined href links inside paragraphs; grant currency sum fix on number cards; Bruno API test runner added to pre-commit hooks.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

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

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Matthew

The Rethink DNS + Firewall project got off to a front-foot start after Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare, publicly offered to hire (?) us, 3 jobless ambitious friends to work on it, merely based on the ideas we laid out on Hacker News (in April 2019, during Ramadan, no less), and one that we didn’t even know would materialize, if at all. In a short while, even after being rejected by Y Combinator for the 2020 winter batch (we’re in good company), we found several (Indian) VCs (rather, analysts cosplaying as general partners) beating down our door to meet with us… Needless to say, this was an avoidable exercise in frustration. Still, I was impressionable back then, had too many magical thoughts about being the next Rajoshi Ghosh, the next Sid Sijbrandij, the next Avery Pennarun, & went to all humiliating meetings expecting something different from each. Once bitten, twice shy? Not me. In the end, these interactions disenchanted me pretty early on, to my benefit: Developing a free cybersecurity software out of social responsibility is not for the uninitiated to grok. On the other hand, it is convenient to loathe those who have more of what you desire for yourself. Anyways, 8 months later, Mozilla was kind enough to choose us (the only India-based project) out of the 1200+ projects that applied, for their 4 month (July to Oct 2020) “Fix the Internet” Incubator. It was modeled after Y Combinator, of which our cohort of 22 projects & companies was expected to be the first of many (it remained the first of only). An eventful accelerating experience, as we shipped more features in those 4 months than we have done in any other time period since. Being accountable to someone you respect out of peer pressure and the fear of failure (in this case, our mentors at Mozilla) was a hell of a motivator (Avicenna, the father of modern medicine, was right: classrooms / cohorts breed healthy competition). If I am allowed to be vulnerable, I’ll say that folks at Mozilla didn’t appear all too impressed with us, or our project, despite our herculean effort to build the anti-Onavo (Facebook’s spyware VPN), to succeed where Moxie Marlinspike’s OpenWhisperSystems didn't. So be it…

All it takes is a little push

In January 2020, Android app MVP built & shipped in 14 days, Rethink DNS (a name chosen by our community) started out as Brave DNS before we were hit with a threatening lawyerism for trademark infringement. At the time, it was flattering that we were important enough for any high-flying ponzi crypto businesses based in Silicon Valley to take us seriously, because clearly, the users weren’t: There was nary a relevant forum, Twitter thread, Discord, subreddit, or Telegram group we didn’t spam, but the downloads count just about crawled past 50 by 28 Aug 2020. It caught the attention of those lawyers, though.

On 29 Aug 2020, a popular Android blog featured the app, and we sprinted past 5000 users in one day. From there on, we kept acquiring 10 users a week, then 20, then 30, then 100, which has now settled at 1000 (and stagnant). To think that one blogger can have such an outsized impact is a lesson in timing, luck, and well, influencer marketing. We don’t get popular press nor influencers to shill about us, because we refuse to pay for the privilege. It is either word-of-mouth or bust. Especially if that word comes from project leads at the Guardian Project (Nathan Freitas), CalyxOS (Chirayu Desai), Jigsaw at Google (Vinicius Fortuna, Scott Carpenter), LineageOS (Oliver Scott), Ente (Vishnu Mohandas), GrapheneOS (Daniel Micay), and PrivacyInternational… that’s all the social validation we’ll ever need.

We are also lucky enough to be constantly supported by a selfless community of translators, moderators, group members, code contributors, willing testers, and generous sponsors that organically grew around our many humble projects. FOSS has its perks. I'm not the one to give “prescriptions”, but since this occasion calls for it, the primary reason why all our projects (even the embarrassing ones) are open source is that “you can't fight gravity” (impressed into me at AWS)… of software wanting to be free. This stance isn't at odds with making money with FOSS (especially B2B), but rather consistent with knowing the constraints & rules of the levers that can be pulled.

Retention is all you need

One of the few reasons we don’t want more users is, we’ve plenty of work left to do for a lifetime. Aside from going to town with i18n (translations), the other priceless tactical decision we made (owning to my 8 year kool-aid training at the AWS mothership on “customer obsession”) was to make it straight forward for our non-paying users to direct their frustration & anger at us: We put links right in our app to our subreddit, GitHub issues, Telegram group, Mastodon, and X (formerly Twitter), which till date, brings in a constant stream of hate love, bug reports, and feature requests to keep us busy until we physically die (which could be any instant, if the Universe isn’t kind). With no mentors left to impress but only actual users (and a few well-meaning professors and communities), we had found our pathway to building the most feature-rich bug-ridden firewall that could possibly be built. Thankfully, GLM, DeepSeek, and MiMo don’t tire like we do from mashing keyboards all day long. We do have a credible shot at vibecoding it all, whether we do it or not (due to code quality concerns), is a different matter. And much to my chagrin, there’s no shortage of vibecoded apps that mimic our project’s features, built in mere weeks, with way fewer bugs, by teenagers who don’t even know what "Cloud" is. Am I crazy? Am I being left behind? Possibly, none or both. Strange times.

In the course of our new found popularity, our DNS resolvers (server-side) were being hammered by, I am presuming, bot networks based out of Turkmenistan, Russia, China, and Iran. The peak (that is, the traffic that got past bot detection) we’ve handled thus far records at 40,000 requests per second, pushing 400TB per month in bandwidth. Optimising every part of the server-side stack short of ripping out the runtime (Node, Workerd, Bun, & Deno) seemed like a thankless, endless engineering challenge just to control the burn rate. I learnt well at AWS to craft-fully avoid the scale of it ruining our sleep, so we did sleep well through it all (except for the times when my twins wouldn’t let me). Due to the unkind invoices, not only did my wife’s savings vanish into ether, but all my credit cards maxxed out in what seemed like a blink. I was now relegated to drinking Sunrise instead of Davidoff. Ours was obviously a textbook case of magical thinking, that rich people EAs will appear from nowhere and start funding our marvelously engineered, censorship-resistant, public-benefit resolver. Alas, on the WWW, popularity is not always a good thing, as Wikipedia reminds us.

Aisi vaani boliye, man ka aapa khoye. Auran ko sheetal kare, aapahu sheetal hoye.

In humans, a near-death experience can bring ample philosophical clarity and rewire psychology. For an unsustainable Free & Open Source project in existential crises, there's but repeated burnout, partly from the endless grind of bugs and feature requests, partly from lack of (monetary) incentives beyond motivation & curiosity, which are never in short supply when you're starting out with an intense desire to want this thing to exist and thrive. From experience, there's no clarity, only bitterness. It isn’t uncommon then for disgruntled FOSS maintainers abandon their absurd Sysphiyan journey or go on rants about “rivals” (like we did; it's a rite of passage). For our project, Rethink DNS + Firewall, we drew plans (in other words, “magical thoughts”) to monetise and live off of it. A million users in 2026, but are we there yet? No. Either it isn’t easy, or we are incompetent. I’d like to think the former, because the thought of the latter is uneasy. We do have plenty of reasons to doubt ourselves regardless, because outside of Mozilla, no other like-minded organization incubated us, supported us, or entertained our applications. In one case, an organization outright refused to meet us, despite the fact that we flew over hills and oceans to do so. I digress.

Not all nails and thorns though. Other doors opened. Between FOSS United, Cloudflare, (now defunct) OSOM Inc, and Zerodha’s FLOSS/fund, we found much-needed respite. Without that, we were toast, both personally & professionally. The Cloudflare angle is interesting because we were one of the early ones to abuse the potential of their Workers Platform for anti-censorship purposes. Since then, many other popular tools and projects have cropped up; and to boost my ego, I like to take credit for kickstarting it all. Cloudflare’s Eng Leads, VPs, SVPs continued to give us time as if ours was a project of consequence & importance. Maybe it is. As before, my ego needs no second invitation.

In particular, FOSS United and FLOSS/fund’s contributions have afforded us, for the first time in years, to be more ambitious & fearless; and present our work to the world, at conferences like FOSDEM. We even treated ourselves to one MacBook Pro M4 to build out a Rethink-like DNS + Firewall for iOS (one of the top asks on the subreddit). Perhaps even pwnd billionaires will find utility in network security tools like Rethink. Our rejuvenation reiterates the importance of India-based organisations and how they readily relate and promptly support India-based developers, while the rest simply wouldn’t, for brownies that escape me. If I am allowed to be cynical, I know what colour I am wearing, the race I am running.

I don’t only want to take, take, take, though. I’d like to think we’ve contributed back to FOSS United by showcasing our modest projects at India FOSS since 2023 (in Sep 2022, I was vacationing in London & Bournemouth, just so you know what I'm sacrificing to attend it). We participate despite the unavoidable shade from disinterested onlookers who make us second-guess our life choices. Not blaming them, as maybe, just maybe, our projects are way too sus… or the three 2 of us are going through mid-life crises… but we still show up, & put our best foot forward. Before I go, I’ll also milk the point, even if no one will concede, of bringing Vishnu at Ente into the FOSS United fold (Vishnu wouldn't even enter the NIMHANS premises when I invited him to India FOSS 2023). What a positive addition to this community Ente has been (if I may say so myself)! As for me, the infectious influence emanating from the successes of ERPNext (Frappé) & Rushabh has brought us all here to this moment. Now, with OpenAI Rushabh as our north star, we do want to give back way more solely out of guilt as a reflection of our gratitude. This blog post is one. Aren’t you inspired?

We are excited to announce a grant of ₹3,00,000 to Subtitle Studio, a modern, cross-platform subtitle editing application.

How it began

Msone is a voluntary fan-subtitling group dedicated to providing free Malayalam subtitles for international movies. Over time, the volunteers in the community frequently expressed the hardships they faced with existing subtitle workflows. Most of the available tools were restricted to desktop environments, and in many cases, exclusively limited to the Windows operating system. Most of the volunteer translators also used mobile apps for subtitle creation. So building a feature rich subtitle editor for mobile became a necessity.

The community needed a solution that wouldn't tie them to a specific device or OS. Understanding this problem, and after quite some feedback from the community, Mujeeb Rahman K, Anzil, and Samir set out to build a tool that would solve these issues.

About Subtitle Studio

Subtitle Studio is a fully free, cross-platform solution that works across all major mobile and PC operating systems. It supports both the creation of new subtitles and the translation of existing ones.

The Android version is available on the Google Play Store, the macOS and iOS versions are available on the Apple App Store, and the Windows and Linux versions can be downloaded directly.

The application brings powerful desktop-grade features to a cross-platform environment, including:

1. Audio Waveform Visualization: A highly requested feature rarely found in mobile-based subtitle editors.
2. Dual Subtitle Support
3. Custom Dictionaries: Utilizing open data from Olam as the default.
4. Video Loading and Subtitle Extraction
5. Marking, Commenting, and Project Saving
6. AI-Assisted Explanations

The Road Ahead

The development team is actively working on expanding the app's capabilities, with features like multi-device content syncing currently in the pipeline. We are proud to support Mujeeb, Anzil, Samir, and the broader Msone community with this grant as they continue to build accessible, cross-platform tools that empower voluntary contributors and translators.

If you'd like to get involved, check out Subtitle Studio's GitHub repository to contribute code, report issues, or suggest features. You can also try the tool yourself at studio.malayalamsubtitles.org.

If you’re a maintainer looking for support, check out the Grants Program. If you’re an organisation/individual that wants to contribute back, reach out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CFP Review Process Overhaul (#1627)

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

IndiaFOSS Talks Archive (#1635)

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

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

IndiaFOSS 2026 Landing

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

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

Stack / Credits Page

Visit: https://fossunited.org/stack

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

HTTPS Link Normalization (#1634)

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

Dashboard Performance (#1631)

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

Documentation

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

Chapters & Jobs

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

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

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

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 6 lakhs to Aravinda VK, in support of his continued work on Sanka, Chitra, Binnacle, Dataframes (D) and other open source projects.

How it started

Aravinda's introduction to free and open source software goes back to 2006, through local Linux user groups and install fests. He was struck by a simple idea, that you could publish your code for anyone to use, learn from, or build on. Two decades later, that idea has turned into a small constellation of open source projects, most of which he still maintains largely on his own, alongside his work as a Partner at Kadalu Investments.

The projects

Sanka is a set of tools for working with Kannada text – encoding conversions, and font and script tooling for the language. Its ASCII-to-Unicode conversion tool is relied on by government offices and organisations, and it powers part of the tooling behind Zerodha's Alar Kannada dictionary. The Sanka app on its own now sees around 50,000 users a month, many of whom have made their own YouTube tutorials to help others use it.

Chitra ("drawing" in Kannada) is a 2D graphics library that lets you generate images and PDFs programmatically, using a simple, readable command syntax inspired by Drawbot and Processing. Built on Cairo and Pango, it's natively supported in the D programming language, with Lua bindings in progress to make it usable from virtually any language or the command line.

Binnacle is an imperative testing and infrastructure automation framework, currently used internally to test and provision GlusterFS clusters and their REST-based storage management APIs. Its syntax is meant to be simple enough that a new test writer or admin can get productive within minutes.

Dataframes (D) brings a Pandas-like dataframe library to the D programming language.

The Grant

The 6 lakh grant will go toward sustaining Aravinda's time across the open source projects. Work planned includes fixing bugs reported by Sanka's users, and rebuilding it as a JavaScript library so that developers can embed it properly inside mobile apps or web pages, instead of wrapping the entire web app the way many users currently do. On Chitra, the grant supports continued work on the Lua bindings and curve support, to make the library easier to adopt outside the D ecosystem. Binnacle and Dataframes (D) will see ongoing maintenance, enhancements, and documentation, with Dataframes (D) moving toward a wider release to D language user groups once it's ready.

Continuing the tradition this year, the foundation and the community got together to organise #MaintainersMay!

We started the campaign with a community call, where we invited our Maintainer Community to share feedback on the Maintainers Program, discuss challenges they face and support they require, and brainstormed a bunch of activities that we could plan during the month. A recording is available here -

Maintainer Meetups

The Maintainer Summit organised as an IndiaFOSS 2025 pre-event was a huge success. There were conversations around sustainability, burnout, marketing for FOSS projects, and a whole bunch of interesting topics. More importantly, this made us realise the value of such a forum that brings together these Maintainers in an unconference format. Taking inspiration from the summit, we decided to organise such meetups all over India during #MaintainersMay.

With the help of our volunteers, meetups were organised in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Detailed notes from discussions that happened at the meetups are posted here.

Huge thanks to Akshit, Onkar, Soham, Rajan (and the RedHat Pune team), Arun for helping out with the events.

Maintainer Meetups have gone well beyond May, and we will continue organising these through the year. We'll see some of you at the Maintainer Summit IndiaFOSS 2026 pre-event in September!

Notes from a Maintainer

We had always wanted to feature guest posts on our blog, and inviting Maintainers to tell their stories seemed like a great start! In May, we featured Prashanth Udupa, Ramya R. and Subhashish P. They are all veterans in the FOSS ecosystem, and their stories are worth a read.

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.

- Ramya

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.

- Prashanth

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.

- Subhashish

You can read all of the blog posts here. This initiative has also went beyond #MaintainersMay, and we now bring you a guest blog post from a new maintainer every month!

All of this started as a fun experiment to find out if there were more than 30 maintainers in India. There are close to 100 people on forklore now. Clearly, India's FOSS ecosystem is growing faster than ever, and our support for the hundreds of people doing quality FOSS work in India has to be a show of force too. Over the last 6 months, we've spent a lot of time rethinking our approach to supporting the digital commons ecosystem. India's digital infrastructure rests on the shoulders of people like these. Behind almost every project that powers modern software infrastructure, there is a person or a small group of people who decided to build something and keep it alive. Foundations, Communities, Organisations and Companies all play important roles in the FOSS ecosystem, but the fundamental atomic unit of FOSS is the individuals who show up. This is why supporting these individuals is the foundation of our work.

The Maintainers Program is our initiative to support Indian FOSS project maintainers across the breadth of their entire journey, from getting discovered to becoming sustainable. A lot more Indians will be creating FOSS this decade, we want to help them sustain and navigate their journeys. If you're an organisation that wants to give back to the Indian FOSS ecosystem, or a Maintainer looking for support, please reach out.

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 8 lakhs to Webminal. It is a free, browser-based Linux terminal and learning platform that has been running since 2011 developed by Lakshmipathi G.

How it started

Around 2010, Lakshmipathi G was an ordinary developer in India, working on a Windows machine, trying to learn Linux. Documentation and tutorials have always existed. But an actual place to practice, a real shell where you typed a command and something real happened on the other side – that didn’t exist.

And he built it. The idea was to be able to simply open a Linux terminal in/on a browser.

Around the same time, on LinuxForums, Lakshmipathi met Freston, who is an engineer from the Netherlands. They started building together. Their entire coordination happened like this:

$ screen -x chat

They typed into the same shared terminal session. That was the communication channel for 5 years. It wasn't until 2015 that they saw each other's faces for the first time.

If you looked at Webminal's tech stack today, you’d be visibly confused. Python 2.7. Flask 0.12.5. Shellinabox, which stopped being maintained in 2017. User Mode Linux, which Jeff Dike wrote in 2001. Pure HTML with inline CSS.

“ Every tech conference talk would tell you this stack is wrong. But it serves 500k users and has been up for 15 years.” – Lakshmipathi.

The reason for using User Mode Linux instead of Docker is that Docker isn't real enough. When you teach disk partitioning — fdisk, LVM, RAID, mkfs — a student needs actual block devices. UML gives each user a completely independent Linux kernel, four virtual block devices, 256MB of memory, and a copy-on-write overlay. It's from 2001 and it does something modern containers still can't.

There were months when Lakshmipathi was between jobs and the server bill kept arriving. He'd sit with his savings and think about whether this was the month he finally shut it down. Then he'd find work, and the thought would go away, and the server would run another year.

The people using Webminal are mostly students, a lot of them in India, at colleges where the computer lab runs Windows, where a VM would require hardware they don't have. Most of them can't afford $4 a month. So the platform has stayed free for fifteen years. Funded, for most of that time, out of one person's pocket.

The Grant

The 8 lakh grant splits into two parts: 6 lakh as a developer stipend so Lakshmipathi can work on Webminal full-time, and 2 lakh toward infrastructure costs – the server bills that have been coming out of his own pocket for fifteen years. The milestones include – First, modernizing the codebase: moving off Python 2.7, cleaning up secrets that were hardcoded into the config, building a dashboard that shows students what they've actually completed. Second, expanding what the platform can teach. Jupyter notebooks, PostgreSQL access, hands-on tutorials for nginx and containers, with checks that stop a student from advancing until a step genuinely works. Third, a Linux kernel programming course. Fourth, features for scale — letting professors track a whole classroom's progress, a version colleges can host themselves, and outreach to universities that don't know Webminal exists yet. The infrastructure money just keeps the lights on while all of that happens.

Please read more about Webminal’s story here. You can contribute to Webminal financially through GitHub Sponsors.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project looking for support, please apply here. Find information about the grants program and previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing back to the ecosystem, please reach out to us at maintainers@fossunited.org

Two weeks into being Programs Intern at FOSS United, and I was at my first conference of this scale. Walking in, it's a lot.  Hundreds of people who all seem to know each other, or at least know of each other, in the specific way open source folks do. There's an expectation of networking that I wasn't fully prepared for. Small talk has never been my strongest suit.

But it turned out to be genuinely nice. A lot of these conversations reminded me why this work matters in the first place.

Open source is tireless work. It gets recognition, sure. Just nowhere near what it deserves.

Seeing Linus Torvalds in person, two weeks into open source work, was a bit surreal, git is such foundational infrastructure. He barely codes now, by his own admission, more development lead than programmer. His real job is conflict resolution: using git merge to understand how thousands of contributions fit. Scaling Linux, he made clear, isn't about tools. It's people, and trusting them to make the call.

The Open Source Innovation Powering India's Digital Public Infrastructure Panel discussion led me onto reading about DPIs (Digital Public Infrastructure). Radha from Networks for Humanity talked about something called DD. Think of it like DNS, but for identity credentials instead of websites. The pitch was open infrastructure that lets networks actually talk to each other, instead of everyone building their own walled version of the same thing.

Digiyatra, in the panel, was an interesting showcase. The data itself is fully decentralized, no central database sitting somewhere collecting everyone's info. But the credentials running on top of it are still proprietary. DPI at scale, apparently, is full of these tradeoffs.

An interesting fun parallel to draw from Ansh’s talk on Strengthening India’s FOSS Community was about FOSS in India tying back to older ideas – swadeshi, self-reliance, who actually gets to own the tools a country runs on.

The Panel Discussion A Balancing Act: OSPOs in Action Within BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) one was a good reminder that "banks love open source" and "banks can actually use open source easily" are two very different sentences. The panel had OSPO(Open Source Program Offices) heads from NatWest, HDFC, and Linux Foundation. BFSI orgs aren't resistant to open source, they're just operating in a space where every dependency needs a compliance trail.

Closed out the two days with the Women & Non-Binary in Open Source Gathering. It felt oddly nice, after two days of moving through rooms where men made up an obvious majority, which is open source, sure, no surprises there. Just being in a room where women and non-binary folks were sharing their stories, their experience of navigating a space that's still very male-dominated, was insightful.

It was heartwarming to hear everyone talk about what inspired them to contribute to this landscape. The conversations weren't just the usual networking small talk. Technical insights, sure, but also real conversation around what it actually means to be a woman or a non-binary person in this space.

I came in expecting a bunch of talks about code. I left with a lot more thoughts about the people behind it – which, in hindsight, feels a bit more interesting personally. Good first conference.