Techies in the social sector
I organised a Birds of a Feather (BoF) Discussion on "techies in the social sector" at IndiaFOSS 2026.
The idea was to understand the development sectors' experience with technology (and technologists), enable interactions with developers who want to contribute to the sector and hopefully create a shelf of problems for people to work on. I wasn't able to take notes during the session, but an attendee was kind enough to volunteer for the same.
We structured the discussion around a few provocations and questions I had prepared. See slides here.
Who is in the room?
I expected this to be a room full of largely non profits discussing problems, but we got quiet a few (mostly young) techies who were interested in building technology for good.
From the "social sector" side, we saw participation from people at Rainmatter Foundation, DAKSH, Samagata Foundation, Tattle, SpicyIP, SAFAR, OKI-IIITH, Tech4Good Community, Project Tech4Dev and a few other orgs.
Arun kickstarted the discussion posing a question around all the ways tech can be used for social problems. This led to many developers in the room sharing their personal experiences, eg. building an app for residents of an old age home - they talked about how keeping the application clutter free was a very important part of their thought process.
Bhavika from GIZ's impact team talked about their work with grassroot communities. She wanted to develop a better understanding of the problems these orgs face and how tech/AI can lead to meaningful interventions.
I posed the following questions to the attendees -
As a CSO, how have you recently seen technology impact people, positively or otherwise? Have you interacted with a FOSS/tech community before? What was that like?
Techies, when was the last time you used (or saw) technology for a civic problem? Have you interacted with a non profit organisation before?
A good part of the discussion focused on how does one even come across these problems. Some people shared examples of how they found the problems they cared about, and solutions they built. The discussion became increasingly technical (as it does), and I had to shut it down when people started discussing "Agentic workflows". I reminded the audience that most orgs don't have the capacity or the requirement for complicated tech solutions. Many small NGOs still use pen and paper to collect data, and the solutions they need are often trivial - forms, ERP, websites.
Swaraj spoke about the perils of tech solutionism and how good intentions don't always translate to good outcomes.
The room also agreed on the fact that building solutions is often the easier part, but it is maintenance that most of them struggle with. The developers often move on and NGOs don't have the expertise to maintain these solutions. Someone pointed out that this gives way to vendor created information asymmetry, where every new vendor asks the organisation to use a different software, often built from scratch and fairly expensive. I highlighted the OASIS alliance's ongoing efforts to build technical capacity within NGOs, especially with the advent of LLMs. Praveen talked about Tech4Good Community's Insight Out workshop series helping non profits experiment with LLMs. Sathya gave a broader picture of the orgs that they (Rainmatter Foundation) work with, and how funding, tech-literacy, information asymmetry can lead to the problem worsening.
Next, I gave them some provocations -
For CSOs
- What is the biggest ops/tech challenge your org faces
- What s/w, tooling do you depend on?
- Do you use any FOSS tooling?
- Are there problems you wish you could solve but don’t have the technical capacity?
For FOSS devs
- Which of these problems can be addressed using existing FOSS tooling?
- How would you go about building a solution for said problems?
In the end, we discussed specific challenges faced by orgs in an effort to list down problems that the devs in the room could work. We decided it would be a good idea for the group to meet again next year and discuss progress. Some interesting problem statements that came out of the discussion -
Around digitisation work, a participant shared that they've been trying to deal with Sindhi literature and are looking for a platform that can help archive these books and digitise them. We pointed them to the Servants of Knowledge booth at IndiaFOSS.
Low/No cost databases/DBMS with smaller storage requirements. Praveen talked about Idlistack as an alternative to look into.