This session took place on 24 June 2021. It focused on why it is important to have multiple languages on the Internet.
Download the session report or watch the recording below.
About the panelists…
Solana Larsen
Solana is the Editor of Mozilla’s Internet Health Report. Formerly, she was managing editor of Global Voices, a community of writers and translators reporting on citizen media and digital activism worldwide.
She is Danish-Puerto Rican and based in Berlin, Germany.
@solanasaurus
Joe Hildebrand
Joe is a technology leader with 30 years of experience and passion for standards and real-world interoperability. He was formerly the Vice President of engineering at Mozilla leading a team of 700 people working on Firefox worldwide. Before then, he was a distinguished engineer at Cisco Systems and the CTO of Jabber. He was a member of the IAB, a board member of Let’s Encrypt, and has co-chaired several working groups of the IETF where he often mediated between competing worldviews to create standards that allow people and systems to communicate
@hildjj
Anasuya Sengupta
Anasuya is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives in India and the USA, across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to amplify marginalised voices in virtual and physical worlds. She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.
@Anasuyashh
Bonface Witaba
Bonface is a multi-disciplinary ICT professional, with a background that includes experience working in: digital inclusion, Internet governance, language activism, local content development, and policy research. He is the co-founder and co-convenor of Arusha Women School of Internet Governance (AruWSIG), as well as the pioneer of ICANNWiki Swahili, a non-profit encyclopedic website that seeks to translate ICANN and Internet Governance related content into Swahili.
@bswitaba
Remy Muhire
Remy is a Community Fellow at Mozilla Foundation, and an experienced community manager with an extensive background in software development. Remy is leading partnership development for early-stage voice data collection, advising the creation of open datasets in multiple languages and guiding the development of local products and use cases relevant to sustainable development Goals
@kenessajr
Rebecca Ryakitimbo
Rebecca is a techie, writer and researcher. She is currently a community engagement fellow at Mozilla, working towards building an open voice dataset in Kiswahili to promote voice technology. She is working on establishing and supporting diverse Kiswahili language and tech communities along axes of gender, age, regional origin, accent and vernacular usage towards building an open voice dataset in Kiswahili. Before joining Mozilla, Rebecca has been an Internet Society fellow, an Afrisig fellow, a Google Policy fellow, a national geographic explorer and a digital rights program officer at Paradigm Initiative.
@rryakitimbo1