I had volunteered to submit the proposal this year, but realised it is not as easy as editing the previous request. So far I was unable to spend enough time for this, and do not have the perseverance or patience to work on this anymore. I would appreciate if anyone else can take up this and send a grant proposal to FOSS United.

Adding my unfinished proposal here. Some parts are not needed anymore (poddery does not host diaspora anymore). I had updated some of the statistics with January 2025 data, but the other data is from 2023.

The FOSS United Grants proposal used to be a form, and was partly converted to an email format but some parts still doesn't sound like an email yet.

Hi,

We are the Free Software Community of India, a collective of Free Software users, advocates and developers. We are running privacy respecting, free software, collaboration and communication services free for general public. Running these services require a lot of time, effort and skill, and cannot be expected from everyone. We believe access to free software services is paramount for free software promotion. To make sure general public has free access to online free software services, including social media, we host free software applications. The current services we provide include:

- Diaspora - social networking service similar to facebook - https://poddery.com

- Matrix - real time chat similar to WhatsApp - https://poddery.com

- XMPP - another real time chat similar to WhatsApp - https://poddery.com

- GitLab - git based collaboration platform similar to GitHub and Codeberg - https://git.fosscommunity.in

- Loomio - collaborative decision making and discussion forum similar to discourse - https://codema.in

- Peertube - video sharing platform similar to YouTube - https://videos.fsci.in

- Jitsi meet - video conferencing similar to zoom, skype or google meet - https://meet.fsci.in

- Mediawiki - editable webpages for documentation - https://wiki.fsci.in

- Mailing list - email based groups similar to Google Groups and email aliases - https://lists.fsci.in

Except for GitLab instance we host, which is sponsored by Infomaniak (https://www.infomaniak.com), we handle the cost for maintaining these services through crowdfunding campaigns. All amount collected will go only for server and domain charges, the server maintenance is volunteer activity by FSCI members. We, Free Software Community of India (https://fsci.in), is a community dedicated to free software advocacy and defending digital privacy. We are not a registered organization or a non profit company, rather a group of volunteers interested in free software. We conduct various events to bring more people to free software community (https://camp.fsci.in) and host free software services.

Current Traction: We are running privacy respecting, free software, collaboration and communication services free for public for more than 9 years. The first service we started, diaspora, still has 1163 users who has used service at least once in last two years.

Statistics of individual projects:

poddery.com (diaspora, xmpp): 1163 users

poddery.com (matrix): 576 users

codema.in: 268 new users since we started self hosting

TODO: update this lists.fsci.in: 2010 email addresses, 43 mailing lists and 14 domains/subdomains

TODO: update this videos.fsci.in: 52 videos locally

git.fosscommunity.in: 726 projects, 4,613 users (including some spam accounts that needs cleanup), 41 groups.

Repositories to handle these services: https://git.fosscommunity.in/community https://gitlab.com/fsci

Requested grant amount: 100000 (update this)

Grant Objective: To pay hosting charges for services FSCI runs.

Budget: (update this too) We estimated ₹ 1,50,000 (1.5 lakh INR) for running all the services for next two years and after clearing our negative balances (loaned by members). You can see our budget discussions here - https://codema.in/d/VkCybRTY/fsci-services-accounting.

Milestones: To run existing services with minimum downtime.