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Beyond engineering

Engineering colleges increasingly include departments or electives in design, law, management, and humanities. The open source and digital commons framework applies to all of them, though the specific tools and practices differ.

Design

The open source design ecosystem is less mature than the engineering one, which makes the contribution opportunity larger, not smaller. Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, Blender, and FreeCAD are all tools design students can learn and contribute to. More importantly, the FOSS software ecosystem has a genuine design problem: most tools are built by engineers, for engineers, and the interface and documentation quality reflects that. Design students who engage with FOSS communities can make contributions that are disproportionately meaningful.

  1. Contribute to tools: Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender all have active contribution pipelines for design work: icons, splash screens, interface improvements, documentation layouts.

  2. UX research: Most open source projects have never had a proper UX study done on them. A final-year design student who conducts and publishes a UX study of a widely-used FOSS tool is making a genuine contribution and building a portfolio that stands out.

  3. Design for public interest: Assist NGOs and civic organisations with open source design assets. Publish all outputs under CC BY so others can reuse them.

  4. Communities to join:

    • FOSS United Design Workgroup: FOSS United is actively building a cross-disciplinary design workgroup. Design students and faculty are explicitly invited. Contact foundation@fossunited.org.
    • VizChitra (vizchitra.com): India's first data visualisation community, active in Bangalore and growing. Runs an annual conference and workshops. Open to students with an interest in data, storytelling, and design.
    • Diagram Chasing (diagramchasing.fun): A small independent publication doing data journalism and visualisation on India-specific questions. Worth following and reaching out to.

Law and policy

Open licensing, software patents, digital rights, and the legal structure of digital public goods are active and unsettled areas of law in India. Law students at institutions with engineering program have a natural research area here.

  1. Work with engineering students: Co-teach a workshop where law students help engineering students understand what licence they should choose for their final year project and why. Both groups learn something the other cannot teach themselves.

  2. Simplify for the community: Open source projects and FOSS organisations often need help translating complex bills and acts into plain language. The IT Act, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and the National Data Governance Framework are relevant to every FOSS practitioner. A well-written explainer published under CC BY is a contribution to the commons.

  3. Fellowships and paths into this work:

    • Policy in Action Program by YLAC (Young Leaders for Active Citizenship): a month long engagement for young professionals and university students who are keen to explore the fields of public policy and development. The program is designed to deliver core skills in policy analysis, advocacy and leadership, along with the experience of working on live projects for policymakers – MPs, MLAs, ministries and other government institutions.
    • Graduate Certificate in Public Policy by Takshashila Institution : The GCPP is a 12-week programme offered in three different specialisations. The programme targets dynamic individuals who wish to enter the growing professional sphere of public policy, public affairs, governance, and leadership.

  4. Communities and organisations:

    • Agami (agami.in): A non-profit working on innovation in law and justice in India. Has built the Justice Hub (an open data platform for legal data), supported OpenNyAI (open source AI for the justice system), and convenes a community of technologists and lawyers. Explicitly values open source approaches.
    • Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (internetfreedom.in): India's primary digital rights organisation. Works on surveillance, data protection, and platform accountability. Publishes policy briefs and analysis under open licences.
    • Software Freedom Law Center India (SFLC.in): The primary organisation working on free software law in India. Has published primers on open source licensing under open licences and advises organisations on FOSS legal questions.
    • CivicDataLab (civicdatalab.in): Works on open data and civic technology. Has collaborated with law students on open legal datasets through the Justice Hub program.

Management and entrepreneurship

Open source business models are poorly understood in most management curricula. Companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Elastic, and in India, Frappe and Zerodha, operate on FOSS principles. These cases belong in management education.

  1. Case studies to develop and publish: India's FOSS ecosystem has no shortage of material: ERPNext's growth from a small team to a globally-used ERP, Zerodha's decision to open source their trading infrastructure, Kerala's Rs 3,000 crore savings through FOSS adoption, the failure modes of open source projects that lost community trust. Develop these as teaching cases and publish them under CC BY so other institutions can use them.

  2. Organisations to engage:

    • IFF (internetfreedom.in): Works on digital rights and can provide case material on the policy side of platform and software choices.
    • SFLC.in: Can provide case material on licensing, litigation, and the legal dynamics of open source adoption in India.

Humanities and social sciences

Digital humanities is an established field that depends heavily on open tools (Python, R, QGIS for spatial analysis, Gephi for network analysis). The commons model maps directly onto humanities research values.

  1. Wikipedia (or the Wikimedia Foundation) as a teaching tool: Wikipedia editing as a classroom exercise is a direct contribution to the world's largest digital commons. Students improve an article related to their research area, cite sources, navigate the editorial process, and publish the result publicly. Dozens of universities globally have made this a standard assessment.

  2. Open data for social research: India has significant open datasets from the Census, NSSO, NCRB, and various ministries. Using and contributing to data repositories that make these datasets accessible and documented is scholarship that benefits others.

  3. Communities and resources:

    • Civicdatalab (civicdatalab.in): Works on open data for social impact. Has run programs connecting students with civic datasets.
    • Wikimedia India (wikimedia.in): Runs programs for Wikipedia contributors in India, including campus editing workshops and the Wikipedia Education Program, which formally connects courses with Wikipedia contribution.
    • Reap Benefit (reapbenefit.org): A Bangalore-based organisation working on civic action, particularly with young people. Has used open tools and data for environmental and governance work. A potential partner for field-based projects.