About — Subhashish Panigrahi

Subhashish is presently the Law for All director at Ashoka, a board member at Global Voices, and a 2017-batch National Geographic Explorer.

In his 13-year career, Subhashish has led fundraising, grantmaking, community strategy, programmes, campaigns, and events across the digital and human rights, open source, tech, media, and multilingual internet spaces — serving 60% of the world's population. As a senior civil society leader, he has raised over $1M in grants, managed over $4M in programmes, and overseen large teams.

He has previously held leadership roles at Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society, and the Centre for Internet and Society. He has been a 2023 Internet Archive dWeb Fellow, 2023 Future|Money Artist, 2019 Yoti Digital Identity Fellow, and a 2017 MJ Bear Fellow. He was a keynote speaker at the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL '23, Dublin) and has spoken at UNESCO, UN deliberations, and international conferences in over 20 countries.

Subhashish is widely published — contributing to three books (including an EU publication and a UNESCO toolkit for digital language activism) and numerous journal, print, and web publications.

"This pioneering work announces future efforts, with 'regional' oralities of India and the world rising back to claim their place in the digital landscape."
— Hugo Lopez, Co-founder, Lingua Libre

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 been a leader in building a multilingual internet — a space where linguistic and cultural diversity is celebrated rather than suppressed. He spearheaded a campaign in 2011 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.