Subhashish Panigrahi

I am a civil society leader, and my work has mostly been around communities, open tech, and media. Using non-fiction filmmaking, community-based research, and media archiving, I have documented the impact of technology on the lives of people and their response to the ever-changing geopolitics. Openness, a layer that binds open-source and licensing among others, plays a key role in my work.

I have held leadership positions at organizations such as Ashoka, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society, and the Centre for Internet and Society. I have been a 2017 National Geographic Explorer, a 2019 Digital Identity Fellow at Yoti, and a 2017 MJ Bear Fellow. I am one of the community representatives to the Global Voices Board.

Broadly, I have advocated and worked for open and secure tech for shifting the state of oppressed human languages and societies.

I have directed and produced ten non-fiction films, focusing mostly on language endangerment and digital rights issues (access, surveillance and openness). In 2017 I founded OpenSpeaks as a set of open educational resources for language documentation, winning a grant from the National Geographic Society. It helped me make three films, including Gyani Maiya (2019, 2023) which was inspired by a Global Voices story and captured the journey of the late Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda who was the second Kusunda-language speaker alive. My 2021 film MarginalizedAadhaar uncovered the impact of India's biometric ID Aadhaar on several marginalized groups.

Views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the organizations I work for or am affiliated to. Connect on Twitter @subhapa or Mastodon.

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