FOSS.in: A conference in transition

In the last few years FOSS.in has established itself as one of the largest open source conferences in Asia. This year the organizers re-orientated the conference to address what they see as the Indian open source community's biggest challenge. LWN dropped by the conference to see the changes and get an impression of the results.

FOSS.in was started in 2001 under the name "Linux Bangalore" in the centre of India's software industry. At that time it was difficult to get information about free software in India -- internet access was still not widespread, the software industry was focused on proprietary tools and the publishing industry had not picked up on FOSS yet. Linux Bangalore addressed an untapped market for FOSS education and was an unqualified success from the start.

LB, as it was known, was focused on encouraging the use of free software in India. The content was a mix of tutorials, howtos and advocacy. The conference retained a user orientation for many years -- the only significant developer activity was from the Indian localization community.

By 2005 FOSS had hit the mainstream. The Linux Bangalore organizers began to feel that it needed a greater raison-d'etre than advocacy and popularization. Despite changing its name to FOSS.in to reflect a larger scope, the danger remained that the conference would soon be lost among a host of other sources of open source information.

It was then that the FOSS.in team, led by Atul Chitnis, turned its attention to another problem. The Indian free and open source community had long worried that its level of participation in the open source process was very low in relation to its size. There were very few visible Indian hackers -- India was beginning to develop a reputation of being a nation of FOSS consumers that did not contribute back. This was especially alarming because many sections of the local software industry had wholly moved to free software. The embedded software industry, for example, had discarded proprietary alternatives in favor of Linux. So there was a large base of qualified developers who did not seem to be getting involved.

After a favorable response to the developer oriented tracks in FOSS.in/2005 and 2006, the FOSS.in team decided to refocus the event on encouraging FOSS contributions. The key, they decided, was exposure and communication. They felt that if Indian developers had an opportunity to meet and interact with active contributors they'd be inspired to do more themselves. To this end, they made a number of changes to the format. They added 'Project Days' -- day long tracks on a specific FOSS project. They reduced the usually hectic pace of the conference by reducing the number of talks. This gave the audience more time to talk to speakers between talks. The more leisurely pace encouraged lots of interesting conversations in the corridors. Other facilities -- a "hack centre" containing machines, tents outside the venue and a lounge area -- provided space for corridor conversations and post-talk discussions to develop further.

The results were mixed. Attendance took a major hit. Previous editions averaged about 3000 attendees, this year attendance dropped by over half to about 1200. It was, however, a far more clued-in crowd which did not plague speakers with off-topic questions. There were some complaints that some talks were pitched at a far more basic level than were needed.

The Project Days seemed to have more participation than was originally expected. There were tracks on Debian, Mozilla, Gnome, OpenSolaris, Fedora, KDE, OpenOffice and the IndLinux project. In contrast, energy levels at the main conference seemed muted. This was partly due to the smaller crowds. However, in the opinion of this correspondent, this was partly due to scheduling and content. The tone of a conference is set early on. The conference would have been better served by an initial keynote that was flamboyant and inspiring rather the low-key technical talk by the decidedly non-flamboyant Naba Kumar (the Anjuta lead).

The insistence on purely technical talks provided context and guidance to potential contributors but may have failed communicate the motivation: fun and high ideals. I think it's fair to say that the most effective recruitment tool was when the always entertaining Rusty Russell made a hapless member of the audience create a kernel patch onstage and mail it to LKML.

The success of FOSS.in/2007 may not be measurable. It may be years before the Indian FOSS community is proportional in size to the Indian software industry. There are probably many other factors that will affect this outcome. But the transition of FOSS.in to a true hacker conference can only help this to happen.