Homebrew's FOSS Talks 4.0

Funding for Free and Open Source projects is an unsolved problem. The Rupee Fund is a new initiative that has a refreshing take on this problem. We aim to be a tailwind for Indian Free and Open Projects - spanning from hardware, software and mixed projects.

Rupee Fund pools small contributions from contributors, using UPI every month - starting from 15 rupees. Indian tea/coffee, and even many Bengaluru darshinis are now more expensive than this! A minimum contribution of 15 rupees might look small, but remember that India has 28 million GitHub users - or 2.8 crore. We pool 3 months of funds into each season. So, if even 1% of GitHub user accounts signup - and each only contributes fifteen rupees, we’d have a funding pool of 1.26 crore rupees four times in a year! And if 0.01% subscribe and contribute an average of hundred rupees, we’d still have 8.4 lakh rupees! Initially though, “attention is all we need” to cross over into becoming a seriously useful thing in a short time.

And how would this be distributed ? A democratic voting mechanism. Only contributors to the fund can nominate projects. And only contributors to the fund get a vote. Third party projects, or self nominations would be accepted on the platform. Everyone gets one vote, irrespective of whether they contributed 15 rupees, or a thousand.

We opened the fund for signups around the recently concluded IndiaFOSS. We have over 50 people interested, willing to fund twenty thousand rupees every month. That’s way more than an average of 100 rupees per head, and so no - this is confirmation that people are way more generous than what we might think. We are already at 60 thousand rupees from the POV of a notional fund size.

We haven’t started collecting the money yet. We want to get to at-least 200 signups, and cross out some more items on our TODO list and then start proceedings with a bang.

The Rupee Fund is an initiative from the FOSS United Community - three of us - Mrugesh Mohapatra, Khitab Mankad, and me (Shree Kumar) have been at it over the past year or so.

In this talk, I will cover various aspects of the Rupee Fund. The back story of how things have reached the current stage. What the fund looks like, what it aims to be, and how we hope to harness collective action to achieve greater awareness of Free and Open concepts.

Given that I will be in front of a FOSS crowd, I’ll happily have the audience review our site and collect feedback. I’d consider it a bonus if I am successful in persuading at-least some of the audience to subscribe and share our campaign too ;)