IGF event page. Under Fair Use.

Join us on December 8 as we discuss at the Internet Governance Forum the collaborative online digital activism strategies for low-resource languages.

On December 8, 2021, Global Voices, through its Rising Voices initiative, will collaborate with O Foundation to host an online conversation at the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) conference, a large international conference featuring key internet stakeholders including representatives from the civil society, UN nation states, regulators, and private organizations among others.

The panel, “Building the wiki-way for low-resource languages” will delve into the language digital activism initiatives in different regions and will focus on three key areas: building capacity of language digital activists, development of various language technology tools and open technology platforms such as Wikipedia and Wikidata for a collaborative and decentralized development of technology and content.

We will hear about Rising Voices’ own initiatives such as the Digital Activism Toolkit and the Language Digital Activism Workshops for India that was organized recently, use of Wikidata (a Wikipedia sister project) for low-resource languages, learning from the Yorùbá and Dagbani language Wikipedias, and linguistic resource development in the Sakha language.

The panelists are:

• Eddie Avila is the director of Rising Voices, an initiative of the citizen media organization Global Voices, and has been one of the key advocates of language digital activism for the protection and fostering growth of low-resource languages.
• Amrit Sufi is the coordinator of the Oral Culture Transcription project, a toolkit that will enable people to access information on uploading media of endangered languages, and has worked in the past for documenting folk songs in the Angika language of India.
• Sardana Ivanova is a doctoral student in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. She is interested in low-resource languages. She conducts research and works on the development of various language technology tools for the support of the Sakha language, mostly spoken in Russia’s Far East.
• Mahir Morshed is a doctoral student researching articulatory features and prosodic unit discovery in speech processing. As a Wikimedian, he has recently been contributing to Wikidata's lexicography and is examining ways to make it usable for text generation.
• Ọmọladé Abídèmí is a Yorùbá scholar from Nigeria. Her focus is to further the growth of the Yoruba Wikipedia and engage the Yorùbá community for wider dissemination in Yorùbá around Nigeria.
• Khadijah Abubakari is a Professional teacher and a Dagbani advocate in Ghana. She and her community members use Wikipedia as a tool to spread and grow the Dagbani language through the sharing of knowledge and information in and outside Ghana.

The panel will be moderated by Subhashish Panigrahi who is a Global Voices contributor, a language digital activist and co-founder of O Foundation.

Register here to attend the online session. More details about participating can be accessed here.