Faisal M. Lalani is a global community organizer with a background in research, activism, writing, technology, and policy. He has worked all over the world, studying progressive pedagogies in rural Nepal, building community wireless networks in townships around South Africa, and analyzing social media patterns of politicians during major elections in India with Microsoft Research. He also partnered with US state governments to manage COVID-19 contract tracing through Dimagi and consulted with high-profile companies throughout the country on data governance and AI for Snowflake. Lalani recently spent several months in Sri Lanka and the APAC region at large organizing civil society, journalists, lawyers, and Big Tech to support regional internet governance efforts and online safety legislation.
Lalani also led national education reform efforts in the US with the Aga Khan Education Board, partners with clinical psychologists throughout Europe on identity and dissociation research, helps mobilize communities globally with the South Asia Peace Action Network, and collaborates with a number of organizations working on tech and democracy challenges (including the Tech Global Institute, Internet Law & Policy Foundry, and All Tech is Human).
Lalani is a graduate from the University of Oxford's Media Policy Summer Institute and holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.