About — Subhashish Panigrahi

Subhashish Panigrahi is a civil society leader and documentary filmmaker. He is a Global Voices author, translator and former Lingua Odia editor, and was a Global Voices co-chair and board member from 2023 till 2026. His work focuses on language technologies, communities and media.

A National Geographic Explorer since 2017, he has directed ten documentaries and founded OpenSpeaks, a language documentation and archiving initiative. OpenSpeaks and ten Indian and international organisations brought to life Archiving the Present, a language documenting and archiving network.

Previously, Subhashish was Law for All director at Ashoka. He has also worked at Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society, and the Centre for Internet and Society, and has raised over $1M in grants and managed over $4M in programmes across these roles. His fellowships include the 2023 Internet Archive dWeb Fellowship, the 2019 Yoti Digital Identity Fellowship and the 2017 MJ Bear Fellowship, and he was a 2023 Future|Money Artist.

He gave the keynote at SIGUL 2023, the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages, in Dublin.

He has also spoken at UNESCO, at UN deliberations, and at conferences in over 20 countries. He has contributed to three books, among them a Council of Europe publication and the UNESCO toolkit Digital Initiatives for Indigenous Languages, and has written for Opensource.com, The Wire, HuffPost India, Asia Times and the Wikimedia blog.

Art and filmmaking

Subhashish has directed ten documentaries. Among his most acclaimed are MarginalizedAadhaar (2021), which premiered at re:publica 2021 Berlin and has been taught at the University of Michigan and Sciences Po Paris; and Gyani Maiya (2019), which won nine international film festival awards including Best Screenplay-Documentary at IFEFA Australia 2022. His films have been screened in the US, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Turkey, and India. Several are archived at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

He uses an Open Filmmaking framework grounded in openness, community collaboration, diversity, ethics, and inclusion. Reach out for advisory on impact filmmaking and documentary research.

Open source and language technology

Since 2006, Subhashish has worked on building a multilingual internet. In 2011, he spearheaded a campaign that revived the eight-year-dormant Odia-language Wikipedia. In 2017, he founded OpenSpeaks, a lab for digital language activists to document low- and medium-resourced languages.

He has created over 5,000 Wikipedia articles. In 2023, he created the largest openly licensed speech corpus in Odia — 72,000 recordings, also the largest South Asian-language speech dataset under a universal Public Domain release. He has also contributed 4,000+ recordings in Odia on Mozilla Common Voice. He has led open-source projects creating transliteration schemes, typefaces, and input methods in multiple languages and writing systems.

Research

Focusing on intersectional and structural issues in tech, society, language, and media, Subhashish has designed multiple research projects. He received a Creative Commons award for expanding OpenSpeaks in Santali; a Rising Voices award for studying digital safety and security in Odia that contributed to the UNESCO toolkit "Digital initiatives for Indigenous languages"; and a Grant for the Web award for investigating web content monetization in Ho and Santali languages.

Academia

Early in his career (2012–2016) at the Wikimedia Foundation and the Centre for Internet and Society, Subhashish designed and implemented the Wikipedia Education Program across India. He has taught and designed courses at Christ University, Srishti, Sciences Po, and IIT Madras, and has spoken at multiple academic conferences including the SIGUL 2023 keynote at Interspeech, Dublin.