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, Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) & Wikipedia. Over the years he helped in building and sustaining FOSS language technology communities 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.
Anivar A Aravind
- Interview: Interview about Indic Keyboard, Published at Global Voices Online, June 12, 2015
- Keynote speech in fossmeet.in Topic: “Fairness in Bigdata & AI” March 10 2017, NITC, Calicut
- Training Session on “Information Security in India’s Digital Payment systems” @ Worshop for “Cyber Security Capacity Building and Training with Law Enforcement Agencies in India” organized by Observer Research Foundation 20th Feb 2017, BSF’s Signals Training School, Bangalore
- Fellow , ICANN57, Hyderabad, Nov 3 -9, 2016
- Talk series in German cities on “Global Justice & Digital World” Organized by BUKO & Rosa Luxembourg Foundation
29th September – Talk in Frankfurt
30th Sept to -2nd October- Talk and Life is No Algorithm conference in Cologne
5th October – Talk in Berlin
7th October – Talk in Hamburg
- Executive Director at Indic Project: Indic project is the newly formed Policy, Standards, development and marketing arm of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing to popularize and build FOSS based Indian language technology solutions for majority of India which does not speak English. As its initator, i am now setting up this as an institution.
- Consultant, Internews’ Internet Freedom Expert Register
- Governing Board Member: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing: I am past secretary, and co-founder this organization, which works on Language computing technology building and localization for Indian languages. with a special emphasis on Malayalam language
- Rep, Mozilla Foundation
- Member, Python Software Foundation
- Member, Software Project International
- Member, Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), ICANN (2009 -onwards)
- Governing Board Member: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (2010-present)
- Governing Board Member: ViBGYOR Film Collective (2007-2014)