We have seen the same technology empowering and disempowering people.

We listen, learn and build media and tech with communities

  • Community media

    We analyse community media in local languages, and document and archive it together with communities.

  • Open tech

    We learn and build community-led technology.

  • Power structures

    We study and document how caste, race, gender and disability influence societies through tech.

Language documentation

Initiative documenting and archiving languages, building tools and capacity of fellow documenters and archivists.

  • 20+Languages documented since 2017
  • 1,000+Wikimedia pages, in 127+ languages
  • 71,000+Audio files at Library of Congress
Trailer of Mage Porob

Explore OpenSpeaks OpenSpeaks Archives

Community network

A community network for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges.

  • 101Workshop applicants, 2026
  • 14Countries
  • 115Languages

It grew out of our 2026 workshops for community documenters and archivists, and shares a manual and a free online course.

Visit Archiving the Present The manual

Open-source tools

Tools for language archivists

Free and open-source language tools.

  • Subtitler Subtitles audio and video.
  • Tome Metadata and consent agreement editor for recordings.
  • Bento Sorts and compresses media files, offline.
  • Text recognition OCR models for Santali (Ol Chiki), Ho (Warang Citi) and historical Odia.
  • OpenSpeaks Voice: Odia 25+ hours of Odia speech under CC0.

All initiatives

Type design

Chapakala

Open-source revivals of Odia letterpress type from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Chapakala 19 by Subhashish Panigrahi and Chapakala 20 by Nasim Ali.

See the typefaces GitHub repository

Type records

Open records of typefaces, type designers and foundries.

  • 260People
  • 180Typefaces
  • 34Foundries and other organisations
  • 55Scripts

Visit the registry

10 films since 2018

Documentary films

A last Kusunda speaker, a Ho harvest festival, songs of a grandmother and volunteers preserving old Odia books.

Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda. Still from Gyani Maiya (2019), by Subhashish Panigrahi.

On our films

“Sensitive and heart-touching! Save your language to save your soul.”

Anvita Abbi, Linguist, on Gyani Maiya

“Tremendous effort to embellish our identity. This is the beginning of a digital revolution in our Ho community.”

Sitaram Pingua, on Mage Porob

“Quite a visual treat.”

Benjamin Franz, Film Threat, on Nani Ma

“A wonderful testament to the power of citizen archivists.”

Carl Malamud, Public Resource, on The Volunteer Archivists