5 years of FOSS Hack
TLDR:
- Community Ownership on the flagship event
- Focus on participants' mentorship
- Beyond FOSS Hack, Introduction of Season of Commits.
When I joined FOSS United Foundation in 2020, my entire job was to organize FOSS Hack 2020, a hackathon, virtually, due to the ongoing pandemic at that moment. One experiment I conducted during my college days was 15-day hack, a similar type of hackathon. Although it wasn't a success, at least I learned a little about hosting a virtual hackathon. During FOSS Hack 2020, I worked with various people, mostly from Frappe and Zerodha. Rushabh helped with sponsorship, building the platform to host the hackathon; Kailash with sponsorship and ideas about community partnerships. Krutika helped with design, Rohan with finding community partners and live-streaming. Shivam helped with the platform and managing participants. And many more people, from the small community (50 people) at that time provided feedback and mentored the participants.
FOSS Hack 2025
The 5th edition of FOSS Hack is happening on February 22-23, 2025. We have now adopted a hybrid mode, online as well as various in-person hosts across the country. At FOSS Hack 2024, we saw 398 project submissions, which was 150 in 2020. With the growth of FOSS United and more awareness about FOSS Hack this year, I can confidently say that we can easily see more than 500 project submissions this year. Apart from me, Ansh and Hari from the Foundation, this year we have on-boarded Harsh Patel as one of the co-chairs and are talking to another community member to help with mentorship, which we want to focus on this year to help young developers.
Overall, the goal is to have more ownership in the flagship events, IndiaFOSS and FOSS Hack, as mentioned in the 2025 strategy draft by Sai Rahul Poruri, CEO of FOSS United Foundation.
Participants' Mentorship
If you have attended any hackathon, you might have seen beginners struggling to build what they aim to. The reason could be one or many from this: choosing the right tools or dependencies, troubleshooting, or not being able to collaborate well with the rest of the team and deliver their best. We have also realized that we should promote people to contribute to FOSS more than just during the FOSS Hack, which is 36 hours; thus, a new program is necessary.
Beyond FOSS Hack
This year, we are introducing Season of Commits, an 8-week online program designed for Indian students to contribute to Indian FOSS projects under mentorship. This two-month-long contribution event will begin right before the FOSS Hack, where we will help students start acquiring skills to contribute to a project of their interest. Even if they aren't able to contribute much during the FOSS Hack, the momentum will be converted into acquiring more skills to contribute significantly to the projects. To kickstart this, we will onboard mentors for specific partner projects and general mentors for participants who are building or contributing to existing FOSS projects.
Call to Action
If you are someone who would like to mentor students, or rather, potential FOSS contributors, please reach out to me at vishal@fossunited.org or fosshack@fossunited.org. I am also available at t.me/fossdot and @wisharya.01 on Signal. You can learn more about FOSS United and FOSS Hack through our website and participate in discussions through the Forum or a Matrix<>Telegram group.