Notes from the February 2026 Governing Board meeting

The February 2026 Governing Board (GB) call took place on Wednesday, 25 Feb 2026. In attendance were members of the board: Bowrna Prabhakaran, Nemo, Swastik Banarwal, and Shree Kumar. They were joined by Poruri Sai Rahul and Ansh Arora from the FOSS United staff. The call primarily focused on Grants.

(Poruri Sai Rahul took notes and also drafted the post)

Grants and recap

1. Ansh walked through the 2025 grants recap, and he then shared grants projections for the FY 2026-27. At the moment, we project an overall grants budget of 50 Lakhs INR, with close to 25 Lakhs INR being allocated for previous and current grantees and 25 Lakhs INR for new grantees.
2. Shree asked us about a recent announcement about our support for the Nagarathna Memorial Grant by Thejesh G N, particularly the details about potential grantees. Ansh clarified that our support via NMG is for any work in the digital commons and not just for code.

We weren’t able to bring this up during the GB call, but Thejesh is part of a new experiment on our part to identify “Lighthouses in the Digital Commons”, i.e., people who have been bringing people together in the digital commons for many years. Supporting “Lighthouses” enables us to expand our reach, while also platforming the work of the “Lighthouse”. We intend to find more “trustworthy Lighthouses” and reach out to people in the broader digital commons ecosystem.

Travel grants, FOSDEM and more.

1. One of the largest grant categories in the current FY is the FOSDEM travel grants for FOSS project creators and maintainers, with more than 3 Lakh INR. Swastik asked us to clarify how we decided on the travel scholarships. Ansh and Nemo elaborated on the FOSDEM situation.
2. FOSS United and FLOSS/Fund, funding.json were allocated a shared booth at FOSDEM, but the Foundation team strongly believed in platforming FOSS developers from our community at the event instead of travelling ourselves. Because the booth needed to have a FOSS United or FLOSS/Fund angle, we decided to go ahead with Prasun @ Zasper, Murtaza and Hussain @ Rethink DNS, and Anand and Laurens @ Ente, because Zasper and Rethink DNS are FOSS United grantees and Ente is a FLOSS/Fund grantee. We got to know that Mecha was also attending the event, and we decided to stretch the booth to include a “projects from India” angle to enable Mecha to showcase their work from our booth. We worked with Nemo to represent the Foundation at the Booth and to ensure that no favouritism was being displayed at the booth amongst the showcased projects. We also supported Nemo with travel support to and from FOSDEM. 
3. Swastik called out that a 1 Lakh INR travel grant was a significant amount, and that he was expecting a smaller travel grant, maybe 50K INR. Rahul clarified that we settled on 1 Lakh INR after looking at travel, accommodation, and visa expenses, and in fact, all of the travel support grantees submitted bills larger than 1 Lakh INR, but their reimbursement is capped at 1 Lakh INR. Ansh also noted that we intend to expand this to support domestic conference travel up to 15,000 INR. Ansh noted that Nemo and the grantees shared that the support was an overall success, but that the process for choosing projects needs to be formalised next year.
4. Rahul proposed working with the Project Showcase booths at IndiaFOSS as part of the overall criteria for next year’s FOSDEM. Ansh mentioned that he will be reaching out to FOSDEM organisers to seek their feedback about our booth and the possibility of continuing this next year.

Fiscal Hosting

1. Multiple grant conversations have highlighted the need for a fiscal host, both for project grants and event grants. Events organised by communities are looking for a fiscal host, both to take care of ticketing and to handle vendor payments and the like. Project grants, on the other hand, were interested in finding a fiscal host who could accept donations on their behalf and handle project-related expenses.
2. Becoming a fiscal host isn’t without its challenges - especially because we do not have an FCRA, and therefore, we are unable to accept international payments from potential sponsors or donors.

Maintainer Programs

1. Rahul highlighted that the FY 2026-27 budget will carve out a new Maintainers Program, within which the grants budget would be covered, including the administrative costs to manage the program. Rahul briefly noted that non-profit organisations generally seek project/program-specific funding, and the Maintainers Program is the distillation of our learnings over the past few years about a clear need in the Indian FOSS ecosystem.
2. Rahul believes that carving out this program and seeking sponsors for it separately might enable FOSS United to raise funds from new donors over the coming FY.
3. Nemo pointed out that seeking new donors for grants subcategories, e.g., diversity scholarships, travel scholarships, might also be worth pursuing.
4. Nemo also called out the need to better acknowledge FOSS United funders, and Rahul noted that the Foundation is working to increase awareness of grantee projects, and that such opportunities will also be used to highlight funders.

Infrastructure Grants

1. Bowrna asked about projects reaching out about infrastructure grants, e.g., to pay AWS usage bills. Ansh clarified that Circuitverse is, in fact, an infrastructure grant where we pay for their AWS usage bills.
2. Nemo asked about the possibility of reaching out to a cloud-service provider, noting that Hetzner has a significant presence in the EU FOSS scene.
3. Ansh pointed out the multiple conversations we have had with AWS around IndiaFOSS, but unfortunately, the conversations ended with us being redirected to the US-based AWS open source team.
4. Infrastructure grant requests are likely to exceed 5 Lakh INR in the FY 2026-27, so we will be reaching out to additional cloud-service providers, e.g., E2E Networks, Yotta, regarding potential support. Nemo also asked about the possibility of FOSS United receiving credits from cloud-service providers, given our prominent stature, and using the credits to support FOSS project infrastructure costs. Ansh pointed out that we hadn’t explored this option and that we could follow up on this.

Miscellaneous

1. While waiting for everyone to join, we briefly chatted about the winners of the NASSCOM Maker Honor awards, 3 of whom are familiar faces in the FOSS United community, and one more case study from the compendium is also a familiar face from Forklore. It’s good to see FOSS work getting recognised by the broader Indian software ecosystem.
2. Towards the end, Rahul shared brief updates about the 80G reapplication process, which has been stuck for multiple years, but has recently started showing progress after a visit to the relevant Income Tax (Exemptions) office in Mumbai. Rahul also shared a brief update about the Mozilla FOSS AI event that happened in Bengaluru on Saturday, the 21st of February.
3. As for the next meeting in March, Shree asked to see the overall budget for the upcoming FY 2026-27.