IndiaFOSS 2026: the docs devroom
On 26 September 2026 we ran the Documentation and Technical Writing devroom at IndiaFOSS 2026, in Hall 3 at NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru. Sujatha Mohan, Agriya Khetarpal, and Srihari Thyagarajan organised it. It was the first thing Write the Docs India did after restarting this year.
Like every devroom at IndiaFOSS, ours was open to anyone at the conference. Write the Docs India is for people who write and look after documentation, whatever their job title says: technical writers, engineers who ended up owning the docs, translators, accessibility folks, and people whose first contribution to open source was a README fix. Ten talks ran back to back with no break, the room stayed full, and the whole morning was livestreamed on YouTube.
How it came together
Srihari wrote the devroom proposal back in April with Agriya, who he also runs SciPy India with, in reply to IndiaFOSS’s call for devrooms. Neither of us was sure it would get picked (a whole room just for docs?). When it did, we went looking for a third person to run it with us. Sujatha had been reacting to the messages Srihari posted about the proposal in the #india channel on the Write the Docs Slack, so we reached out to her. We’re very glad she said yes!!
We got far more proposals than three hours could hold, which is a lovely problem to have, and choosing between them was the hardest part of the whole thing. A few of them would work even better as hands-on sessions, and we’d love to bring those to a future meetup.
In the weeks before the conference, several speakers did a mock run with us over a call, and we went through most decks before they went onto the presentation laptop.
A big thank you to Aaishwarya Mishra and Mahima Agarwal, who reviewed decks with us and sat in on the mock runs.
Unfortunately, three of our speakers couldn’t make it in the last week, for reasons outside anyone’s control. We were sorry to miss their talks and hope to hear them at a meetup soon. Pooja Sanwal came in from the waitlist at very short notice and ended up opening the devroom. Thank you, Pooja!! We planned to use one of the open slots for an unconference.
On the day
Getting the livestream going took longer than planned right at the start, which is why the first 19 minutes of the recording show only the IndiaFOSS devroom overlay. Once it was up, the three of us opened with a short introduction to the devroom and the chapter. The delay used up the time we’d set aside for the unconference (you’ll see it struck out below), so it’s on our list for a future meetup.
Schedule
The talks
In running order. The timestamp in the margin takes you to that talk in the recording.
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watch 19:34
What FOSS Documentation Needs to Thrive in the Age of AI Search
Pooja Sanwal, DigitalOceanDevelopers now ask AI tools for answers in the middle of their work, and documentation that isn't a source for those answers quietly drops out of sight. Pooja looked at what makes a README, a tutorial, or an API reference get cited rather than just indexed.
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watch 32:10
Why Documentation Shouldn't Feel Like Plain Text
Padmashree S S, Google Summer of Code with SwiftSource code gets diagnostics and go-to-definition. So why should a symbol link in a doc comment be plain text that you only find out is broken after building the whole docs? Padmashree's answer is her GSoC work adding DocC language features to SourceKit-LSP. She was also one of our first-time speakers.
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watch 41:02
Documentation That Drives OSS Adoption: Lessons From Bruno
Ganesh Patil, BrunoGanesh has been building Bruno's documentation from the ground up for over two years. He shared what that taught him about starter guides that get people to something working quickly, and about using search analytics and feedback to find where readers get stuck, since what people search for rarely matches what the docs call it.
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watch 1:02:00
Ctrl+F for 34 Years of India's GovTech
Vinamra Harkar, Bharat DigitalAfter IndiaFOSS 2025, Vinamra went digging into the history of India's government technology and found 34 years of the National Informatics Centre's newsletter, Informatics, locked in PDFs nobody could search. Over a few weekends, and for under ₹500, he turned its 3,865 articles into a searchable archive. His point: something being public doesn't make it usable.
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watch 1:18:38
Refactoring documentation without breaking it
Srihari Thyagarajan, DeepnoteRenaming a heading or moving a page is a refactor, but editors treat it as a text edit, so links break and CI only reports it once the site is live. Srihari went through three link-repair PRs from real projects and what an editor that understood the whole docs project could do instead.
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watch 1:35:43
Changelogs Are Not Enough: Writing Community Memory for Kubernetes
Harini Anand, IBMHarini writes and edits for Last Week in Kubernetes Development (LWKD), a SIG Contributor Experience newsletter. A changelog tells you what changed; a new contributor wants to know what deserves their attention. She walked through the judgment calls behind a single LWKD paragraph, and made a case we'd happily put on a poster: in her words, "writing is not a consolation prize in open source."
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watch 1:48:44
Writing Docs for Two Readers: Humans and AI Agents
Pritesh Kiri, Harness and LitmusChaosYour docs have a second reader now. Pritesh showed how the same page can hand a person a good answer and an AI agent a confidently wrong one, then went through writing sections that stand on their own, what llms.txt and MCP do and don't solve, and when to refuse to optimise for the machine at all.
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watch 2:15:32
Python Now Speaks Tamil: Getting Official Docs Translated for a Mother Tongue
Murugan Santhosh, PyTamilMurugan coordinates the Tamil translation of Python's official documentation, now one of Python's official translations. He covered the PEP 545 process and the Sphinx .po files, but the harder parts were human: agreeing on Tamil words for "iterator" and "decorator", finding bilingual contributors, and keeping reviewers from burning out. He's a first-year student, and another of our first-time speakers.
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watch 2:29:22
404: Empathy Not Found
Kalyani Desai, Red Hat, and Yash Guddeti, Energy ExemplarUnderneath most documentation failures, the writer has forgotten what it felt like to not know the thing. Kalyani and Yash took four places that shows up (assumed knowledge, missing context, error messages written for the writer, and inaccessible design), gave each a before and after, and finished with a five-question empathy check to run before you publish. They opened on "404: Empathy Not Found" and signed off with "202: Empathy Restored".
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watch 2:53:00
Printable, Downloadable, Forever: An Ode to Offline Documentation
Agriya Khetarpal, QuansightAgriya closed the morning with a case for shipping docs as files alongside the website: a PDF opens without a network, can be annotated and printed, and keeps working after a domain lapses. He compared Typst, WeasyPrint, Pandoc, and Quarto, was honest about when an offline build isn't worth it, and suggested attaching the files to release tags.
Thank you
To every speaker, for the weeks of work behind these talks and for putting up with our mock-run notes. To everyone who came and stayed for the whole morning. And to the FOSS United team and IndiaFOSS volunteers who ran the venue, the AV, and the livestream.
What’s next
We want Write the Docs India to be a regular thing: meetups in a few cities where people who write and maintain docs can show their work and learn from each other. Going by the proposals and the room that morning, there’s a lot of interest!!
City meetups come first. For now, the WhatsApp community has a general channel and a volunteers channel, and that’s where the planning happens. We’ll add a channel for each city as local groups get going. Between the three of us we’re in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Delhi, and people in Pune are already keen to start one there. If you spoke at the devroom or came to watch and want to help run a meetup where you live, say hello there.
The workshop-style proposals we received are exactly the kind of thing we’d like to run at a meetup, and talk ideas are welcome any time through the talk proposal form. Once we settle on a regular date, it’ll go on the homepage, and we’ll write up each meetup here.