Life update
This is a late update, but I got my acceptance for the Young India Fellowship by Ashoka University sometime last month.
After a lot of thinking and discussions with friends and mentors I've decided to pass on this opportunity. This was obviously not an easy decision because I know how good the program is and how hard it was to get in. Everyone I spoke to about the fellowship had only good things to say and encouraged me to pursue it. As I went through the application stages it became something I was genuinely excited about.
The whole philosophy of unlearning stuff, an interdisciplinary education and everyone saying how this fellowship "opens up your mind" is definitely appealing and something I felt I really need.
Why stay?
After a lot of intense debates/fights, re-orgs and existential crises, the FOSS United foundation seems to have found its footing. We have been able to highlight focus areas, long term plans and shortcomings; and now have strong, dedicated leadership. More importantly, I am now able to see the impact of the work we do. For how thankless of a job FOSS is considered, I struggle to accept the validation I get from the work we do. The next few years are crucial for the Indian technological landscape, and FOSS needs to come in a big way.
What's next
IndiaFOSS 2025
I can't express how hyped I am for the conference already. The conference is on track to become financially sustainable for the foundation, will have some interesting pre-events (including a day 0) + devrooms and is much more volunteer driven (2 of the 3 conference chairs are non FOSS United staff!)
FLOSS/fund
I've been helping out with the outreach efforts for FLOSS/fund. It's been quite a shocking experience to find out how severely underfunded the global FOSS ecosystem is while VCs continue throwing money at startups that are "changing the world". It's not really the "grants" aspect of the fund that interests me so much. Being involved in the fund is helping us put FOSS United on the global FOSS landscape, and opens up opportunities to talk and collaborate with some of the best FOSS projects, foundations and communities. I'm especially excited about the discoverability ideas that FLOSS/fund is experimenting with. This has the potential to act as an enforcement mechanism that will help communities all over the world to push for companies to pay up.
I also have a few personal projects/ideas in mind around the socio-tech sector that I want to work on, or at least finally pen down this year.
The point of all this being, I've finally found my place in the ecosystem and am already doing a lot of unlearning and "opening up my mind" stuff. It feels counterintuitive to give up all of this for a chance at a potentially mind-blowing fellowship experience that most probably leads to a consulting job where people get to "change the world".