Anamika Dey
Dr Anamika Dey is the CEO of GIAN (Gujarat Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network) and a researcher working at the intersection of traditional knowledge sovereignty, community data governance, and grassroots innovation in India.
For over a decade, she has worked with the Honey Bee Network — one of the earliest models of community-owned knowledge documentation, built on principles of recognition, reciprocity, and benefit-sharing with knowledge holders. Long before "data commons" became a tech conversation, the Network was asking: who owns what a community knows, and who profits from it?
She brings this lens to questions of Community Data Sovereignty, ethical bio-entrepreneurship, and what decentralised governance of knowledge actually looks like on the ground — in villages, not whitepapers. She is also the founder of The Little Himalayan Co., a social enterprise that attempts to close the loop between knowledge holders and markets without extracting value from either.
She is interested in finding how decentralised architectures can serve communities that have the most to lose from centralised platforms — and the most to contribute to a more equitable web.
Sessions
Innovation is happening every day on farms, fishing boats, and community plots — most of it never digital. Networks like Prolinnova, the Kenyan Peasant League, and the wider Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA) have spent decades sharing this knowledge through farmer innovation fairs, printed materials, person-to-person exchange, and small circles where attribution and trust are kept intact. As distributed-web tools mature, there is real risk of repeating old patterns — extraction, scale, communication breakdown — with new vocabulary. This session is a grounded conversation from networks rooted in Agroecology (Nyéléni 2015): what currently works, what farmers fear, and what genuine alliance with the DWeb community would actually look like.
As industrial agricultural platforms accelerate corporate data enclosure, predatory data scraping, and top-down digital monitoring, grassroots movements are reclaiming the technical architectures that govern their livelihoods. This panel showcases practical infrastructure co-designed directly alongside land stewards across three distinct global contexts. Featuring field insights from rural India, the open grain fields of the upper Midwest, and Indigenous-led labs in Hawaiʻi, the speakers will demonstrate how decentralized systems can amplify localized innovation and support data sovereignty.
GIAA member networks — the Honey Bee Network and GIAN in India (over one million records), Prolinnova across Africa-Asia-Latin America, L'Atelier Paysan in France, Schola Campesina in Europe, Farm Hack and OpenTEAM in North America, and the Kenyan Peasant League — are federating their tools, data, and knowledge commons without collapsing into centralization, supported by the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance. This hands-on workshop demonstrates the working prototypes of both hardware and software infrastructure in production and surfaces the live governance tensions — federation without flattening, Prior Informed Consent and conditional-use licensing, membership criteria, and federation failure modes