Siko Bouterse is a feminist hacker of social systems, community organizer, and Wikipedian, who advocates for a more emancipatory and plural open web where it’s safe to be ourselves. She’s the former Director of Community Resources at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she led participatory grantmaking focused on supporting marginalized communities and organizers across the movement. Before fleeing Silicon Valley, she led online community and localization initiatives in non-profit and tech startups. Siko also spent time working at galleries and museums in California, and living in Egypt. In all these contexts, she learned first-hand how colonization plays out, and where her own power and privilege comes in. Siko has a Master’s Degree in Middle East History from the American University in Cairo, is raising a strong feminist daughter, and is happiest by the ocean.

Siko is a co-director of Whose Knowledge?, a global campaign working to create, collect and curate knowledge from and with marginalized communities, so that the internet we build and defend is ultimately an internet of, for and by all. We believe this can only happen by centering and affirming marginalized communities in the world’s knowledge, history, and online commons.