Learnings from a $1M discovery and funding experiment FOSSASIA Summit 2026

FOSSASIA Summit 2026 Sunday, 8 March, 2026 9:00 AM (Asia/Bangkok) To Tuesday, 10 March, 2026 7:30 PM (Asia/Bangkok)

Info Featured Schedule Speakers Exhibition

Learnings from a $1M discovery and funding experimentIn October 2024, we announced <a href="https://floss.fund/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">FLOSS/fund</a> out of <a href="http://zerodha.tech" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Zerodha</a> as a big experiment to fund critical Free/Libre Open Source projects globally, which in turn was the culmination of a series of ad-hoc funding attempts over the years. It is the first of its kind in India, and one of the few in the world. Over the last year, some of the biggest and most important FOSS projects in the world applied to the fund. We received applications from all sorts of projects - developer tools, programming languages and libraries, critical FOSS infrastructure, to humanitarian and social-impact projects, all organically via word of mouth and <a href="https://forum.fossunited.org/t/community-sourced-list-of-critical-and-or-underfunded-foss-projects/4749" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">volunteer outreach</a>.While the experiment itself has done really well (and we have already set aside another $1mn for 2026), there have been several (un)surprising <a href="https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#what-has-not-been-great" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">disappointments</a> and learnings.In this talk, we will share our experience from running this program, what we learnt, what other projects and funders should know, and our <a href="https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#what-s-next" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">plans</a> for the future (eg. making FLOSS/fund a community driven effort, pushing for the creation of an Indian sovereign FOSS fund etc.)We will also introduce (at the risk of proposing yet another standard) <a href="https://fundingjson.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">funding.json</a> - an open JSON manifest for describing FOSS funding requirements that we launched as an experiment with FLOSS/fund. At the time of writing this proposal, the manifest has already been adopted by some of the biggest projects globally, and several platform integrations are in progress with GitHub, f-droid, <a href="http://thanks.dev" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thanks.dev</a> etc.Check out the $1mn <a href="https://floss.fund/projects/2025" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">allocation</a> from 2025 and the <a href="https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">anniversary post</a> for more details.