Issues that matter

0 mn
indigenous people worldwide

Two-third live in ASIA

The Internet is broken!

The Internet and the World Wide Web were designed with decentralization in mind, and equal access to and participation by all the people. Over the years of its evolution, it’s fair to say that those goals for a an open, universally-accessible and decentralized Internet and the “dWeb” (decentralized web) have failed as the Internet has become a tool for propaganda, (mis/dis)information and even is been used widely for violating the privacy of individuals.

The most linguistically-diverse countries are the biggest threats to diversity

There exists 6500 languages in the whole world (UNESCO)
Brink of extinction 50%

Asia, which is known for its ethno-lingual diversity is also home to two-third of the world’s indigenous peoples. That is 260 million people! However, these communities are extremely vulnerable to a wide range of risks of being neglected/targeted—politically, socially and their rights and social injustice. The knowledge commons reflects this neo-colonization—majority of the content on the Internet ignores the facts that matter about the underrepresented communities. Let’s look at Wikipedia.

The knowledge commons is inequitable!
Wikipedia is still the sum of "some knowledge" and not "all the knowledge" yet.

0 % Wikipedia content
written by 1% editors—mostly white males from North America and Europe
Wikipedia_gender_gap
0 out of 10 Wikipedia editors are males
Only 1 is female/transgender

Participation of women, LGBTQI people, indigenous and other marginalized groups are almost negligible on the Internet in general and Wikipedia/ Wikimedia projects in particular.

OpenSpeaks is our multimedia open resource toolkit for language documentation. (more)

Pothi is a multimedia resource project for documenting intangible cultural heritage like performance arts. (more)

We’re working with some of the underrepresented communities to co-create open resources (Open Source tools and related Open Educational Resources and open data).

This project is aimed at creating resources for the Santali-language including an ASCII → Ol chiki converter.