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
As proprietary technology systems increasingly deploy artificial intelligence to centralize agricultural advice and enclose farm data, how can open-source networks utilize these same tools for community empowerment? This 60-minute session moves away from high-level theoretical debates to look at real-world case studies of AI applied to agroecology. Opened by Anamika Dey, the session features four short presentations illustrating how open-source software, voice-first data processing, and localized models can protect indigenous knowledge, automate documentation, and elevate the lived expertise of land stewards.
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