Onboarding new developers and contributors to open source communities has entry barriers based on awareness and skills. Sanil shares his experience building SODA Foundation open source community from scratch in India to the top 1 active developer community. However, the focus is on the journey and practices followed to get the students' community aware of the real potential of open source for their careers. The result is a batch of 360 students from a college got on board with a mandatory open source engagement for 6 months to SODA Projects to learn and contribute. Sanil thinks this model could be valuable to experiment with students/academia across the globe. Especially this can build a channel for students in India to build global technology credibility through open source. He is getting it deployed to more universities in India.

This is a true story and journey with specific practices in enabling academia to open source. Sanil would like to share it with the open source leaders and community to get a more collaborative view to strengthen and get it deployed widely.