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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.

Faisal is the founder and CEO of MouthShut.com, India’s largest consumer review and recommendation platform, with reviews on lakhs of products

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. 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.

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Mamtaa Verma is responsible for the administration and financial coordination for SFLC.IN She is a treasurer in SFLC.IN’ s board and in charge of Board meetings and related procedural activities. Prior to joining SFLC, she worked as an Executive with GE Capital Finance Pvt Ltd. Mamta is a Chartered Financial Analyst and holds a Bachelor degree in Commerce ( Hons.) from the Delhi University.

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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.

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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.

Venkatesh Hariharan is the India representative for the Open Invention Network, an organization that protects the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community from patent litigation and Public Policy Director for FOSS United, an organization that represents the FOSS community in India. He set up the Data Governance Network, a network of think-tanks, as Senior Fellow of the IDFC Institute before taking on his current role. Prior to that, he was Director Fintech for the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), that built Public Digital Infrastructure like IndiaStack (www.indiastack.org). In this role, he helped some of India’s largest banks adopt India Stack, and its components like eKYC and the Unified Payment Interface. He is also a member of the Governing Board of the Software Freedom Law Center, a law firm that represents the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities.

Hariharan has served as Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs with Google, and as Corporate Affairs Director for Red Hat in the Asia-Pacific region. He has worked on key policy issues like Internet regulations, open standards, software patents, open source in government, and Indian language computing. He is a former Executive Editor of Express Computer and the first Indian to be selected for the prestigious Knight Science Journalism Fellowship (1998-99) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hariharan has delivered talks on technology and policy issues at World Foresight Forum, Open World Forum and at leading academic institutions like MIT, IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, IIIT-Bangalore, IIM Bangalore and many others. Hariharan is interested in the intersection of technology, society and policy, with a specific focus on democratizing access to knowledge.

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Sairee Chahal is the Founder, CEO of SHEROES – a community platform for women, offering support, resources, opportunities, and interactions via Sheroes.com and the SHEROES App. Sairee is credited with building up women at work and future-of-work conversations in India, besides building a strong technology play to solve the problems of gender disparity in India. A technology entrepreneur, Sairee has straddled the best of both worlds in her ventures Newslink, Fleximoms, and now SHEROES. Her community-meets-deep technology approach has made SHEROES a globally formidable platform, changing the game for women and their aspirations. Over a million women have been directly benefited, and under Sairee’s leadership, SHEROES aims to impact over 100 million women in the next five years.

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Alolita is a senior manager at AWS where she leads open source observability engineering and collaboration for OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana. Alolita is co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Observability, member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and a board director of the Unicode Consortium. She has served on the boards of the OSI. Alolita has led engineering teams at Wikipedia, Twitter, PayPal and IBM. Alolita has been one of the core group of people who has helped find SFLC.in and has been a supporter since its inception in various roles.

Anivar A. Aravind is Founder Executive Director of Indic Project, a civic-tech non-profit initiative works on language engineering, technology standards and digital rights of native language users. He is a software engineering executive, mentor and strategist with 12+ years progressive experience in mentoring many free and open source software projects and start-ups in social technology space to find their feet, assisting in various capacities. Anivar’s passion is in the intersection of technology, policy and law with from the perspective of human rights & software freedom.

Anivar has a long track record of initiating, sustaining and running various technical, policy and developer platforms and mobilizing people support and participation in such initiatives. He has deep understanding on Internet ecosystem and standardisation process and actively engages with Internet Governance and various digital rights campaigns.

He has taken leadership role in free Software and free Knowledge communities of scale like Mozilla, Libreoffice, & Wikipedia. Over the years he helped in building and sustaining FOSS language technology communities like Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) in India, Initiated successful advocacy efforts on ICT public policy Improvements, and contributed to the launch and maintenance of many thematic and regional networks & conferences. He is a Mozilla Rep and contributing member of Software in Public Interest(SPI), Python Software Foundation(PSF) &The Document Foundation(TDF).

Bishakha Datta (@busydot) works on gender and sexuality in digital spaces, runs the non-profit Point of View in Mumbai, writes and films non-fiction, is part of the wikipedia family, and serves on several non-profit boards. In all her work, Bishakha explores marginal, invisible, and silenced points of view – or those considered illegitimate. Her documentary work includes In The Flesh, a film on the lives of three sex workers, and Taza Khabar, which delves into a unique women-run rural newspaper. Books she edited include Nine Degrees of Justice, a collection of essays on the struggle against violence on women in India, and And Who Will Make the Chapatis?, an anthology on rural women’s political participation.

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Deepak Maheshwari is a public policy practitioner with a keen interest in its interplay with technological innovation and socio-economic development. An oft-invited speaker, his views, reviews and comments have been published and cited widely.

Currently, he is Senior Consultant at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Advisor at the Indicus Centre for Financial Inclusion (ICFI) and Advisory Board Member of Software Freedom Law Centre (sflc.in).

As Senior Visiting Fellow at Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), he led the project to support Department of Telecommunications during India’s G20 Presidency. He has also been a Distinguished Fellow at Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) and Senior Fellow at Centre For The Digital Future (CDF). He also served as the first CEO of Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI).

Earlier, he led the public policy function in Microsoft, Mastercard, Symantec, and Sify for over two decades spanning India, South Asia, ASEAN and China regions.

A strong believer in the transformative power of public private partnerships, he co-founded the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the ITU-APT Foundation of India and helped form the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI).

He has volunteered as Global Chair of the IEEE Internet Initiative, Advisor to the IEEE Global Public Policy Committee, Secretary of the ISP Association of India (ISPAI) and Advisory Board Member of the IIM Ahmedabad-Idea Telecom Center of Excellence. He has also served on several government committees – including that on AI and Accessibility.

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Mumbai-based Geeta Seshu was once principal correspondent of ‘The Indian Express’. Today, she lectures on the media at several universities, including Bombay University, SNDT University, Marathwada University and Symbiosis. She was also the editor of the magazine, ‘Humanscape’. She has written for WFS and one of her recent pieces dealt with a filmmaker’s attempt to understand the life of her domestic help.

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Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya is the Founder & CEO of Zerone Microsystems Pvt Ltd & President of the Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research. He is a noted expert in Technology policies and Technology led societal transformation. He has had a significant impact on the thinking around indigenous development of key digital utilities. He is a former head of the Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution in India, World Economic Forum and former Head and Partner, Economics and Policy Practice, KPMG. He is a recipient of the APJ Abdul Kalam Award for innovation in governance, and Global Corporate Affairs Leadership award for a decade of contribution, and the “Shiksha Rattan Award” for excellence in teaching. He was also an Advisor to the President’s office of Sri Lanka on e-Governance and ICT Policy as part of the Centre for e-governance.

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Osama Manzar is Senior Ashoka Fellow and British Chevening Scholar who founded Digital Empowerment Foundation which has empowered more than 25 million people in India and several global south. He has served on various committees at MeiTY, MIB, CII, and served boards of APC, World Summit Awards, World Wide Web Foundation’s A4AI, Down To Earth, and many more.

twitter: @osamamanzar

Prabir Purkayastha is a an engineer and a science activist in the power, telecom and software sectors. He is one of the founding members of Delhi Science Forum and its Secretary. He has written and published extensively a variety of science and technology policy issues in several leading journals and newspapers including ‘Economic and Political Weekly’, ‘Times of India’ and a number of Delhi Science Forum publications.

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Priti Krishtel is Co-Founder and Director of Treatment Access of I-MAK. Priti has obtained her law degree from New York University (NYU) School of Law and has worked as a health attorney in the U.S., Switzerland and India. Prior to founding I-MAK, she served as the Senior Project Officer of the Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit in India.

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Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is an Open Source Initiative board member. He is Founding International and Managing Editor of peer -reviewed journal First Monday and Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT. He has undertaken several studies on Free Software which he terms “FLOSS” – an alternative term for Free Software which he is credited with coining.

Smriti Parsheera is a lawyer and public policy researcher. Her work focuses on issues of data governance and digital rights, regulatory processes and competition policy. She is currently a Fellow with the CyberBRICS Project hosted by FGV Law School, Brazil and a PhD scholar at IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy. Before this, she was involved in setting up and led the technology policy work at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. She has also worked with the Competition Commission of India, the United Nations Development Programme and the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission.

Tahir Amin is I-MAK’s Co-Founder and Director of Intellectual Property. Tahir practised as a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales with two of the leading IP firms in the UK and also served as an in-house global IP manager for a multinational company.He has over 15 years experience in prosecuting, licensing, opposing and litigating trademarks, patents, and designs.

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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.

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