Proposing FSCIConf as a more Free Software aligned national conference

@Akshay I agree.

For people who are new to organizing events, see https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/21/Bids/India for an idea of what all things we need for bids - though we don't need this detailed bid as our scale is much smaller. DebConf is usually 2 weeks and people from around the world attends it. We can create a smaller version of this https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/General/Handbook/Bids/LocationCheckList and probably reuse https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/General/Handbook/Bids/PriorityList

@Pirate Praveen I really like the idea of a conference with focus on the Free Software Philosophy (without any dislike for IndiaFOSS). Quick questions:

• Any plans to make sure this doesn't divide the community?

• Any chance of convincing IndiaFOSS organizers to make Free Software Philosophy the main theme for at lest one edition? This will help us get an idea of participation, contributions, challenges, etc.

@Nandakumar Edamana I don't think there has to be a single conference everyone goes to, I don't think having more conferences will divide the community. All the people in the community won't be able to attend IndiaFOSS anyway.

@Pirate Praveen we should be careful though not to promote (and to actively discourage) any "anti-IndiaFOSS" talk if that's a thing.

@Nandakumar Edamana I don't think such fundamental philosophical differences can be changed, especially when it is not a personal opinion/decision but businesses are involved. For profit businesses have to answer to their share holders profit motives. But still many people have tried in the past. If you (or anyone else) are optimistic in convincing them, you can try giving them feedback at https://forum.fossunited.org/t/indiafoss-2025-feedback/6530

From a public policy perspective, there are three agents of change in a community: the State (goverment or as they say in the north sarkaar), the Market (businesses/commercial enterprises or bazaar) and also Society (civil society or samaaj). All three have their own strengths and weaknesses.

FOSS United's work is more aligned with the Market (though they interact to some extent with State and Society as well).

Similarly, Kerala government initiatives for example would be coming mainly from the State (unfortunately there is not such a big initiative on the national level).

FSCI's focus is on the third agent: Society. While there has been a lot of focus on software in the Market and to some (much lesser) extent in the State, there is a lack of such focus in civil society, and that is the area in which we are focusing. (Of course we wish there was more focus on the State side as well but right now the focus is on Society).

Framed in this way, the conference/initiative is not an adversary to IndiaFOSS/FOSS United but complementary. Of course there's no issue with multiple conferences and nobody says there has to be only one conference. But if the question comes up directly then this is one way to look at it.

This difference of us working in the societal sphere rather than in the market can also help in understanding of initiatives like Prāv. People sometimes don't understand the model and ask how Prāv is going to be profitable, or give suggestions to do that which we don't want to follow. This misunderstanding stems from the fact that most people think of developing software for the Market (even many individual open source projects are designed to showcase skiils and get a good job in the Market) whereas we are trying to construct a model by which Society can get together to develop and maintain software for its own use. Of course, we live in an environment where the State and Market also have a role to play, and we have to acknowledge that by for example making sure we have a workable model to raise funds and comply with (or oppose!) government regulations but that is not the main focus of the endeavour.

@Badri Sunderarajan I think the state-market-society classification is a reasonable categorization of what exists out there. But there's another dimension — that of politics. There perhaps is two categories in the dimension of politics. Broadly this could be called the left-right divide, or the socialism-capitalism divide, or the fraterntiy-competition divide, or the congressive-ingressive divide. There would then be six categories of work

You say FOSS United is aligned to market. But FOSS United is also working with college students (society?), and with policy makers (at least in the past). But I agree that most dominant arguments there are about market.

It seems to me that you're probably simplifying the above 6 into the following 3 categories:

• Society as political where it is possible to talk to people and swing them to either side

• Market as necessarily ingressive where there's no other alternative

• State as a reflection of various forces

One of the founders of FOSS United themselves had a talk about Remaking Capitalism, which in my understanding was an attempt to bring some congressive thinking into the "Market" dimension. But I do not know how far that succeeded.

Perhaps it is right that congressive work has to succeed in "society" sphere before it can succeed in "market" or "state". Perhaps that's why you say FSCI is focused on society. But if you use the 6 category framework, you'll still see FOSS United as focused on a different kind of politics. Take this table for example

It is easy to think that Market is out of our control. But market is part of the society. And if we really think free software has a coherent philosophy, we have to be able to see how it fits in "market", and "state".

@Akshay in that case the idea of not being antagonistic to FOSS United is dead and gone 🫠

Perhaps the different focuses of FOSS United on Market and FSCI on Society is just a reflection of where we can be most effective at the moment, i.e strategic and not ideological. What do you think of this table (I just added one column):

We are starting on society as without understanding there it's harder to directly go to market and governance. Whereas FOSS United's philosophy has already made inroads in the market (as well as society to some extent and governance to a lesser extent).

We are also benefitting from FOSS United's work on the technical level as there are more software solutions available to work with. However, it could make our advocacy work harder as people may have to unlearn the "open source" philosophy first. Or maybe it won't, if we are targeting different kinds of people.

@Badri Sunderarajan Strategy and ideology are inseparable. But this table which does contextualization of strategy/ideology contrasting it with reality looks good to me. FSCI is clearly out of "mainstream" and has no hope of being mainstream in the immediate future. Why one would choose such a "hopeless" strategy can only be explained by ideology :)

On the other hand, I do not really agree with the statement that FOSS United has made more software solutions available to work with. I haven't used any software that came out of a FOSS United hackathon. I have used Bruno in the past for a week but it wasn't really much of a use. The software I use on a day-to-day basis include loomio, firefox, libreoffice, conversations, element/matrix, fairemail, thunderbird, gnu, linux, jitsi, ffmpeg, vlc, etc which I don't think FOSS United made available. If anything FOSS United has created an expectation that software should be built only when you get paid for it.

While drafting the hardware section of the FSCI manifesto, I realised that what we are aiming for here is not to do with software specifically, or even software plus hardware. It's about having the freedom and agency to use and modify the technology we use—whether hardware, software, firmware, digital, analog, or anything else—in a way that works for us, while allowing others to do the same in the way that works for them (as we have more or less been doing since the Stone Age?).

Mentioning this here because it provides more options for the conference name: it can now incorporate "tech" or "technology" and we're not stuck dancing around "free as in beer" and "open as in corporate" 🙃

@Badri Sunderarajan Using FSCI in the name keeps focus on the community - usually events get more focus than community or Free Software itself. Oftentimes people confuse FOSS as an event! Especially when conferences are named more generic like foss.in IndiaFoss or FOSS@NITC, often times activities start and end at a few events too - especially in campuses. So I don't like losing focus in an effort to expand the canvas.

@Pirate Praveen I don't think it is expanding the canvas, just updating the canvas description to reflect expansion that has already taken place.

Anyway, regarding conference name, I proposed it because "FSCIConf" sounds very complicated to remember as a conference name. Unlike "FOSS", it is not even pronounceable as an acronym.

But if including the community name is important I guess we don't have many options.

Yes, "FSCIConf" is hard to communicate; another issue is that it gives the idea that it's a conference exclusively for FSCI members.

@Nandakumar Edamana how about: Free Software Conference of India?

@Badri Sunderarajan but that redefines the acronym FSCI, right? @Pirate Praveen what about making it an Indian edition of LibrePlanet? I mean, LibrePlanet India affiliated to libreplanet.org? Will that work out?

@Nandakumar Edamana I personally don't want to affiliate with FSF (probably others in the community too because of how RMS was brought back to FSF)- there is already FSF India affiliated to FSF, but they are not very active.

@Nandakumar Edamana that actually a plus, I want people to join FSCI. I don't want the primary focus to be on the conference. That is exactly how conferences organized by communities like Debian, Fedora, GNOME or KDE work. They all want to build their communities and bring new people. I prefer the event to be similar in that spirit, even though FSCI has a wider canvas than those projects. Any Free Software contributor (not just technical contributions, but anyone investing time and effort in any way) is welcome to be a member of FSCI. I do want to build FSCI through this conference, not just have a conference for its own purpose.

@Badri Sunderarajan I did consider Free Software Conference of India - but that would be confusing and make things worse - people think FSCI is a conference just like how FOSS.IN used to make people think FOSS is a conference - people often ask - are you going to attend FOSS this year?

@Nandakumar Edamana see https://fsci.in/blog/statement-on-rms-rejoining-fsf-board/ for a background on this issue - at that time we lost people on both sides - those who strongly opposed and those who strongly supported RMS.

@Badri Sunderarajan The name FSCI itself was decided after considering many names. See https://codema.in/d/1Z3oWqR7/proposal/bmTSXAFs for a background on that naming process.

@Pirate Praveen regarding "Free Software Co{mmunity,nference} of India", doesn't that depend on how we do the marketing? We can have reminders through the conference and posts that beyond the conference there is also the community you can join.

@Badri Sunderarajan we already spend too much time to explain different terms, I don't want us to create yet another confusion. But if you really feel strongly, we can have a poll for the name.

@Ujjwal Kumar Singh @Kiran S Kunjumon @sahilister @Tanzeem Mohammad Basheer @Akshay @kishy @Abhijith B @Nihal @Manoj Karingamadathil @Nemo thanks for volunteering. Please coordinate among yourselves and take the next steps for inviting bids from local teams/communities.

Proposing a meeting next week. As its mostly holiday/long weekend/Diwali till 22nd.

Let's meet on following date for initial discussion:

Date: 23rd Oct/thursday

Time: 9 PM

Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/xMGJGbgqMp-AHjCBlBsV (please add things you want discussed there).

If you have a better time suggestion, please comment, else ... let's meet at this time on Jitsi.

Seems like I forgot the meeting, thanks @Nihal for the heads up.

Proposing another meeting. Preliminary meeting to discuss ideas and structure and further plan of action.

Date: 26th Oct/Sunday

Time: 9 PM

Link: https://meet.fsci.in/fsci-conf-0

Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/xMGJGbgqMp-AHjCBlBsV (please add things you want discussed there).

@Ujjwal Kumar Singh @Kiran S Kunjumon @Tanzeem Mohammad Basheer @Akshay @kishy @Abhijith B @Nihal @Manoj Karingamadathil @Nemo @Badri Sunderarajan

(and we should move to some other communication channel next)

Only @sahilister and I were present in the meeting. We decided to talk individually to those who expressed interest and hope to get everyone together in the next meeting. We also discussed a tiny bit about the conf - that's all in the pad. A wiki page is being made to hold all the info together.

Wiki page has been created https://wiki.fsci.in/Conference