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FOSS United 2020-21 report

Report of FY 2020-21.

June 26, 2021 · 5 min read

FOSS United Mission

FOSS United Foundation aims to promote and strengthen the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem in India.

Summary

Since FOSS United Foundation was established in 2020, we have been working to achieve our goals by granting funds to quality FOSS projects coming out of India, organizing monthly and yearly events to engage the FOSS community, and building a platform to teach and mentor fundamentals of programming to students. In Jan 2020, we started helping NPOs to enable them with technology with the partnership of ERPNext.

Events

We have started with yearly events like the IndiaOS conference, FOSS Hack and FOSS + Industry Roundtable. The first version of yearly events happened on the following dates:

IndiaOS Conference: 18th January 2020, Bengaluru.
FOSS Hack: 12-13 September 2020, Online
FOSS + Industry Roundtable: 20th February 2021, Online

We also started monthly community meetups in Dec 2020 which happens on the 2nd Saturday of every month. We invite our community members to talk about their projects which benefit the overall community. Recently we started First Commit, a series of events where students/budding developers get the chance to learn by Ask Me Anything (AMA) style discussions from contributors working with large and interesting FOSS projects. More details on the website.

Grants

In FY 2020-21, we have funded three projects and two organizations to achieve our goals to build quality FOSS projects-

Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), IFF is a non-profit organisation that defends online freedom, privacy, and innovation in India. Grant amount: ₹ 26,00,000
AdonisJs, which is a fullstack MVC web framework for Node.js created by Harminder Virk. Grant amount: ₹ 6,00,000
Fika Lang, which is a statically typed functional programming language geared towards building web applications built on top of BEAM, the Erlang VM, created by its lead developer, Emil Soman, the project's first prototype was presented at FOSS Hack 2020. Learn more about FOSS Hack 2020 below. Grant amount: ₹ 5,00,000
TinkerHub Foundation, which is a non-profit organization that organizes large scale workshops, programs, and community events to give hands-on hacking/dev and FOSS experience to budding hackers and students. Grant amount: ₹ 1,00,000
Biswas, principal developer of the Rebuild Earth / Kerala Rescue project that was instrumental to the rescue efforts during the Kerala floods. Grant amount: ₹ 1,00,000

Projects

Apart from grants we provide to build quality projects, we have also pledged to build projects at FOSS United. We have been working on building a platform to teach programming for students and to create courses for students. Check out the projects and contribute on GitHub.

Mon.School

Mon.School is a community managed and built social learning platform whose goal is to help people learn coding by connecting and accessing high-quality content and mentors. We have launched our first course, The Joy of Programming and received very good feedback from the initial batches of students. Check out the launch video during May FOSS Meetup or the about page to know about Mon.school.

Support to Non Profit Organizations

FOSS United helps non-profit organisations get access to a large number of business tools that help them manage their day-to-day affairs easily, everything from HR, payroll, and accounting to customer relations and communications. We do this by offering cloud hosting of the free and open source ERPNext suite and training and onboarding at a nominal cost. You can find the updates on the implementation at NPOs on the forum. More information can be found on the website.

Community

The FOSS community of India is fragmented. Our goal is to bring all FOSS enthusiasts together. To achieve this goal we organize monthly community events to connect FOSS enthusiasts, we invite people to join our web forum and telegram community and join or start the conversation about the issue we have in the Indian FOSS ecosystem. Some of those conversations have led to events like FOSS + Industry Roundtable 2021 and the First Commit sessions series. Learn more about FOSS + Industry Roundtable 2021 through this blog, well written by Rushabh Mehta. If you haven’t joined the web forum or telegram community, I am requesting you to please join and be a part of the FOSS conversations there. You can also find the archive chats of our telegram group on the static website tg.fossunited.org. Find the tool for exporting Telegram group chats into static websites which is built by Kailash Nadh here.

FOSS Hack 2020

FOSS Hack 2020 was an online hackathon that happened on 12th & 13th September 2020. More than 3300 participants registered for that 36 hours coding sprints. The hackathon had an amazing line of speakers who shared their journey and contribution with the participants. With the support of 11 sponsors and 22 community partners we were able to make FOSS Hack successful, we saw amazing projects like Fika Lang coming out of it. It was great to see participants' energy in a remote hackathon. The total pool prize in the hackathon was ₹ 10,00,000.

Interviews

We interview FOSS contributors and share their journey, learning to the FOSS community members through the blog posts. So far, we have interviewed Pranav Raj, Author of Chatwoot, Anand Pillai, founder of BanPyPers, one of India's earliest programming language communities, Liyas Thomas, author of Hoppscotch and Shivani Bhardwaj, developer at OISF. You can read those interviews on our blog page.

Financials

Income
Funders	Amount
Frappe Technology Pvt. Ltd	₹ 8,00,000
Zerodha Technology Pvt. Ltd.	₹ 33,40,000
FOSS Hack 2020 Sponsors	₹ 11,00,000
Memberships	₹ 3,12,451
Indirect Income	₹ 57,543
Total Grants Received	₹ 56,09,995

Expenditure
Area	Amount
Grants	₹ 26,27,119
FOSS Hack 2020	₹ 7,64,371
Consultant/Employee	₹ 17,85,500
Fellowship/Stipend	₹ 1,50,000
Other Operational and Financial Expenses	₹ 6,27,452
Total Expenditure	₹ 59,54,443