Software Freedom Law Center, India Team is excited to announce the special guest column posts on our website https://sflc.in. These guest columns feature opinions pieces from many eminent personalities who have made significant changes in Legal, Tech and Policy spaces of the Industry and society.
Many of these guest columns are a series of columns either on the same or different topics from there respective spaces.
We publish these columns after every two weeks.
First in this series of guest columns
Youth and Privacy: It does matter
Launching first in the series of special guest columns with the first column from Faisal Farooqui.
Faisal Farooqui is a highly recognized IT entrepreneur who is among the trailblazers of his generation. He was among the lead petitioners who challenged the various sections of the IT Act, which finally resulted in a victory for the entire nation, when the Supreme Court declared 66A as illegal and diluted many other sections. As a result no more arrests for speaking your mind. No more content take down without a court order.
Faisal is the founder and CEO of MouthShut.com, India’s largest consumer review and recommendation platform, with reviews on lakhs of products
Faisal has addressed and presented at more than 300 national and international conferences and seminars including at IIM Ahmadabad and IIT Mumbai. His work on Internet Technology, Branding, Entrepreneurship, social media and e-commerce has appeared or been profiled in almost all major newspaper and magazines and TV channels in India as well as Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC and Financial Times. He is also internationally recognized for his thoughts on integrating consumer-generated content with mobile and social media. He served on the Internet Task Force of NASSCOM and was an advisor to TIE for India’s new Copyright Act. The British High Commission has included Faisal among the list of top 50 young leaders who’ve demonstrated potential to change the country.
Faisal has a degree in Information Systems and Finance from State University of New York.
He is a self-confessed tech geek, enjoys growing vegetables and loves horse-riding.
Faisal is also a board member for Software Freedom Law Center, India
Second in this series of guest columns.
Towards a Progressive Cryptocurrency Policy for India
Second in our series of guest columns is the opinion piece by Satish Babu.
Satish Babu is a Free Software activist, Internet advocate and development professional based out of Kerala, India. He is the founding Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous academic/research institution of the Government of Kerala, India, where he worked from March 2011 to September 2015. He was earlier the CEO of SIFFS, a co-founder and President of InApp Information Technologies, and is associated with several national and international professional societies such as IEEE and the Computer Society of India (CSI).
Satish has been active in Internet Governance since the 2009 IGF. He was a Fellow of the 2012 European Summer School in Internet Governance (EuroSSIG). He is associated with ICANN since 2012 and with ISOC as a member since 2009. He was appointed the Interim Chair of the Asian, Australasian and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of ICANN in Sep 2016, and elected as Chair in Nov 2016.
Third in this series of guest columns
Distributed Decentralized Technology for empowering people is still a dream!
Dr. Nagarjuna G is one of the founding members of the FSF India and is currently serving as its Chairperson. He is a faculty at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education,TIFR in Mumbai. He is an author and maintainer of the GNU project GNOWSYS, and leads the gnowledge.org lab in Mumbai. He holds M.Sc.(Biology), M.A. (Philosophy) from University of Delhi and Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in the area of Philosophy of Science.
Fourth in the series of guest columns
Internet Governance in Times of a Pandemic
Prof. Rahul De is the Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor in ICT for Sustainable Economic Development at IIM Bangalore. He has a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, an MBA from the University of Delhi, and a Ph.D. from the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
Fifth in the series of guest columns
Aarogya Setu Protest
Vickram Crishna, is a technologist, a human rights activist, an activist for personal privacy protection, and has been a practitioner and a commentator on media, technology and management practices. He was involved with the development of the Hawking Communicator, software designed to replace the traditional point-and-click computer interface paradigm. He is currently engaged in doctoral research related to the development of communication technologies for persons with palpable physical/sensory challenges.