Grants:Project/Chinmayisk/Community toolkit for Greater Diversity/Profile

Chinmayi S.K.

Project Lead, Community toolkit for greater diversity
Chinmayi S.K. is an English Wikipedian with experience of working with the Indian-language Wikipedia communities. She has previously conducted outreach activities in India aimed at bridging the gender gap in Wikimedia projects. Among the Wiki-related trainings she has conducted Wikidata and wikitools workshops, Wikipedia-editing workshops and Ally Skills trainings.

Chinmayi works on gender and technology initiatives in India and runs an organisation called The Bachchao Project. She has more than ten years of experience of working with openness communities around the world. She has authored a manual along with Rohini Lakshané and Willow Brugh on creating inclusive technologies. She has also run open-licensed courses on the same topic and created methodologies for workshops and facilitation documents for international organisations such as Geeks Without Bounds and Internews.

Rohini Lakshané

Project Co-Lead
Rohini Lakshané (User:Rohini) has been a Wikimedian since 2008, editing Wikipedia in three languages, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. She served as the chairperson of the Gender Gap Special Interest Group at Wikimedia India Chapter (March 2013-June 2014). During her time as the chairperson, she drafted a policy and work plan for the gender gap initiative in India. She also served as a Wikipedian-in-Residence (pilot project) for Wikimedia India Chapter and the Bombay Natural History Society in 2013. Rohini was part of the two-member Diversity and Inclusion team at WikiConference India 2016. The team, which also acted as the Incident Response team at the conference, drafted the Code of Conduct, Friendly Space Policy and guidelines for organisers on diversity and inclusion of participants and speakers. Since 2011, Rohini has conducted and supported numerous workshops, outreach activities, and edit-a-thons. She has been a speaker at various Wikimedia events, including Wikimania 2016, where she gave a talk on “Gender gap in the global south: Lessons from policy and outreach”. Rohini is also a member of the Simple Annual Plan Grants Committee. Along with Chinmayi S.K. and Willow Brugh, she has co-authored a manual on creating inclusive technologies.

By profession, Rohini is a technologist, public policy researcher and a former technology journalist and editor. She has worked on several research and advocacy projects on the intersection of technology, policy, and civil liberties. Her body of work encompasses diverse territories such as the application of technology and policy to solve issues of gender inequity, violence and discrimination; access to knowledge; openness; patent reform; and making tech spaces diverse and inclusive. From October 2013 to April 2014, she served as the editor of EroTICs (Exploratory Research on ICTs and Sexuality) India, a project on the cross-hairs of gender, sexuality and the Internet. In 2014 and 2015, Rohini served on the jury of The Best of Blogs, an international award honouring excellence in online activism, instituted by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Email: rohini dot lakshane at gmail dot com

Shobha S V

Resource Person
Shobha S V loves the internet and, believes that it should be easily accessible to one and all. Hence, she is passionate about open access and open knowledge and works towards understanding issues that prevent people from accessing this wonderful medium. She has been a researcher on projects that have investigated how women experience abuse and hate on social media platforms. She has been involved in organizing Wikipedia edit-a-thons to address the issue of the gender gap on the platform in India. She has also led social campaigns promoting women's right to access the internet in India. Professionally, she is a digital media professional with a combined cross-sectoral experience of more than twelve years in journalism, research and digital media for non-profits.

Adviser (internal)

Tanveer Hasan

Tanveer Hasan (User:THasan_(WMF)) is pro bono adviser to the core team comprising the project lead and the two resource persons.

Advisers (external)

In alphabetical order.

Geeta Seshu

Geeta Seshu is an independent journalist engaged in reporting and analysing media issues, in particular on freedom of expression, media ethics, media ownership and working conditions of journalists. Geeta Seshu embarked upon a career in journalism in 1984 and worked in Indian Express, Mumbai, till 1996. She was editor of Soulkurry, an Internet portal for women and was Editor of the niche social issues magazine ‘Humanscape’.

She has been tracking media representation of women in the mainstream media for several years. She was a Senior Research Fellow of the Awa Wadia Archives for Women and archived the campaign against sex-determination of the Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-selection (FASDSP) in 2010.

Geeta lectures on the media and has written on television and regulation in India as well as on digital access and online abuse of women in India.

She is a member of UNESCO’s Media Freedom Committee, India, formed in 2016 to promote freedom of information and freedom of expression, pluralism, diversity and inclusivity in the ownership and content of media in India. Since 2010, she has coordinated the Free Speech Hub, an initiative of the acclaimed mediawatch site The Hoot to track freedom of expression in India. Currently, she is Contributing Editor of The Hoot.

Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and media critic whose writing appears regularly in national and international media including The Atlantic, The Nation, Verge, Quartz, TIME, Salon, The Guardian and The New Statesman. She speaks frequently on topics related to inclusivity, free speech, sexualized violence, data and technology. Ms. Chemaly is co-founder and director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, an international civil society network dedicated to expanding women’s civic and political participation. She currently serves on the national boards of the Women's Media Center and Women, Action and the Media, as well as on the advisory councils of the Center for Democracy and Technology, VIDA, and Common Sense Media. Prior to 2010, Ms. Chemaly spent more than fifteen years as a market development executive and consultant in the media and data technology industries. After several years at the Gannett Corporation, where she was involved in establishing the newspaper industry’s first business-to-business and business-to-consumer database marketing systems, she moved into the data and technology sector as an executive with Claritas Inc, a pioneer in geodemographic and psychographic consumer marketing.

In 2013, Soraya won the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s (AEJMC)'s Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award. In 2014, she was named one of Elle Magazine's 25 Inspiring Women to Follow in social media. In 2016, Soraya was the recipient of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press’s Women and Media Award. In 2017, she was the co-recipient of the Newhouse Mirror Award for Best Single Feature of 2016 for an in-depth investigative report on free speech and online content moderation, The Secrets of The Internet, and a Wikipedia Distinguished Service Award, for exemplary contributions to the advancement of public knowledge and the collection, development, and dissemination of educational content. She is the author of the upcoming book, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger.

Zara Rahman

Zara Rahman leads the Research, Engagement and Communities team at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation supporting civil society to use tech and data more effectively. Her research has focused on supporting the responsible use of data in advocacy and technology. She is a Visiting Fellow with digitalHKS at the Harvard Kennedy School, and in 2016/17 was a fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City. She also sits on the Advisory Committee of CREA, a feminist human rights organisation based in India, and she writes about digital policy and technology in Bangladesh for Global Voices. Previously, she worked for School of Data, building data literacy among civil society and journalists; for OpenOil, an organisation founded to increase the amount of publicly-available data about the extractive industries in order to improve governance of the sector, and for Access Info Europe.

Module writers

In alphabetical order.

Abhay Xaxa

Abhay Xaxa is a New Delhi-based adivasi activist and an anthropologist by training. Abhay works with various tribal land rights movements and research institutions in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. He values grassroots democracy and horizontal solidarity of historically marginalised communities. Abhay believes that “A more just world is possible”, which motivates them to research, write, speak and campaign on issues of indigenocracy, land rights for the landless, multiple marginalities, budget rights, and caste-based discrimination.

Alagammai Chenthilnathan

Alagammai Chenthilnathan is a 12^th standard student at The School KFI, Chennai and is an intern at the Equals Centre for Promotion of Social Justice. She is a person deeply interested in reading about current issues and writes about them in her blog, https://alaguwrites.wordpress.com/. Her aspiration is to become a writer and publish something.

Amba Salelkar

Amba Salelkar is a lawyer and works with the Equals Centre for Promotion of Social Justice, an organization that focuses on effective evidence based law and policy interventions towards the inclusion of persons with disabilities with a focus on stakeholder participation. She is based in Chennai.

Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Krishna (User:KCVelaga) primarily contributes to English Wikipedia, on topics related to military history. He has contributed to several Featured, A-class, and Good Articles, and reviewed more than a hundred Good Article nominations. He also contributes to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, and is an OTRS Agent. For the past two years, he has been extensively involved in organising various outreach activities for a wide range of audiences. This includes edit-a-thons, photowalks, strategy salons, online campaigns, conferences and skill-building workshops. He is a University Innovation Fellow of Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Stanford University.

Mary Beth

Mary Beth was teaching in Bethany Christian College before she become active in social work. In 1996 she experienced serious ethnic conflict and armed violence which led her to start working on human rights. She joined Rural Women Upliftment Society as Chief Functionary in 2002. She is the co-founder of Women in Governance (WinG). She also initiated “Coalition on Environment and Natural Resource (CENRs)”, a civil society coalition in northeastern India that works for indigenous peoples rights and their resources. She is also South Asia adviser to the Urgent Action Fund for Women.

Mary Beth has presented a number of seminar papers at national and international platforms. Her key skills and experiences include women's leadership, conflict transformation and natural resources of the indigenous community.

Mary Beth strongly believes that women should have an equal share and opportunity at all levels; family, community and society at large. She committed herself for women's human rights work and engages in amplifying voices of local women for changes in their daily peace and security.

Priyangee Guha

Priyangee is a Legal Research and Policy Analyst. She has a graduate degree in Law (Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar) with post-graduation in Public Policy (King’s College, London) and Law (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai).

She works with victims of gender-based violence. She also undertakes legal trainings in various subjects with lawyers, social workers, police officers, school principals and teachers. She has conducted trainings about the Juvenile Justice Act in India, laws related to sexual abuse of children, the right to education, rights of tea plantation workers in Assam, and sexual harassment at workplace laws.