O Foundation

O Foundation (OFDN) is an Indian non-profit organisation that works on openness, digital rights, access to knowledge and media freedom. It examines all four areas through the lenses of race, caste, gender and disability. The foundation describes its mission as listening, learning and building media and technology with communities, recognising that the same technology can both empower and disempower people. Its work is organised around three broad areas: community media, open technology, and power structures. In community media, OFDN analyses media in local languages and documents and archives it together with communities. Its open technology efforts focus on learning and building community-led technology. Under power structures, it studies and documents how caste, gender, disability and race influence societies through technology. OFDN is known for initiatives such as OpenSpeaks, a project for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges, and for its documentary films in and about languages including Kusunda, Ho, Remosam (Bonda) and Sundanese. It has documented more than 20 languages through OpenSpeaks and produced a body of documentary films. The foundation also runs a type design project, Chapakala 19, which revives a nineteenth-century Odia letterpress typeface released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The organisation collaborates with a range of partners, including Whose Knowledge?, Wikitongues, OpenWords and the Council of Analytical Tribal Studies, Koraput. Its original content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence, and its website source code uses the Anti-Capitalist Software License (v1.4). OFDN is a small, community-oriented organisation with a core team and a network of collaborators across many countries and languages.

O Foundation (OFDN) is an Indian non-profit organisation. Its founding members are listed as Mrutyunjaya Kar, Shitikantha Dash, Shreekant Kedia, Prateek Pattanaik and Sailesh Patnaik, with Siko Bouterse as an advisor. The foundation has built a portfolio of work centred on openness, digital rights, access to knowledge and media freedom, examined through race, caste, gender and disability. A central initiative is OpenSpeaks, a community network for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges. Through OpenSpeaks, OFDN has documented more than 20 languages and produced documentary films in and about languages such as Kusunda, Ho, Remosam (Bonda) and Sundanese. Its films include Gyani Maiya (2019), Gejmehac Gipan, Bringing Down a Mountain, The Volunteer Archivists, Nani Ma, Remosam Mage Porob, Karinding, Marginalized, Aadhaar and Who Owns The Content. The foundation also runs Archiving the Present, a community network for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges, with OpenSpeaks as a key organiser. OFDN engages in type design through Chapakala 19, a revival of a nineteenth-century Odia letterpress typeface released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. It has also produced a network manual, a course on WikiLearn, and workshops on language documentation and archiving. Its work has reached people in 101 countries and 14 languages, according to its website. The organisation collaborates with partners including Whose Knowledge?, Wikitongues, OpenWords and the Council of Analytical Tribal Studies, Koraput. Its original content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, and its website source code uses the Anti-Capitalist Software License (v1.4). OFDN continues to operate as a small, community-oriented foundation with a core team and a broad network of collaborators.

• 2022

  Paper 'Building a Public Domain Voice Database for Odia' presented at Wiki Workshop, The Web Conference 2022

• 2019

  Documentary film Gyani Maiya released

A community-oriented non-profit at the intersection of openness, digital rights, access to knowledge and media freedom, with a focus on marginalised communities and languages.

• OpenSpeaks

  A community network for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges.

• Archiving the Present

  A community network for archiving oral languages, memories and knowledges, with OpenSpeaks as a key organiser.

• Chapakala 19

  A revival of a nineteenth-century Odia letterpress typeface, released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

• Documentary films

  Films in and about Kusunda, Ho, Remosam (Bonda), Sundanese and other languages.

1. 1O Foundation homepagetheofdn.org
2. 2About us | O Foundationtheofdn.org
3. 3Wikidata Q140936769wikidata.org