Satish Babu

Satish Babu
Satish Babu (2015)
Born	(1961-04-05) April 5, 1961 (age 56)
Nationality	Indian
Occupation	ISOC/ICANN/IEEE/InApp/CSI
Known for	Internet & FOSS Advocate

Satish Babu (Sathees Babu C.S, born: 1961) is a Free Software activist, early Internet advocate and development professional based out of Kerala, India. He is the founding Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous academic/research institution of the Government of Kerala, India, where he worked from March 2011 to September 2015. He was earlier the CEO of SIFFS, a co-founder and President of InApp Information Technologies, and is associated with national and international professional societies such as IEEE, Internet Society (ISOC), ICANN, and the Computer Society of India (CSI).

Satish has been active in Internet Governance since the 2009 IGF. He was a Fellow of the 2012 European Summer School in Internet Governance (EuroSSIG). He is associated with ICANN since 2012 and with ISOC as a member since 2009. He was appointed the Interim Chair of the Asian, Australasian and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of ICANN in Sep 2016, and elected as Chair in Nov 2016.

After his post-graduation in 1984, Satish Babu joined the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS), an NGO working with small-scale artisanal fishers of South India, and a fledgling at that time. He worked there for 17 years, initially as Executive and later on as CEO. SIFFS, under his leadership was one of the earliest organizations to utilize computers, especially for its commercial activities such as boat building and Outboard Motor programmes. SIFFS was part of several international networks. As a part of one such network, ICSF, Satish organized the first-ever Internet training for fishers in Latin America at the Catholic University of Lima, Lima, Peru, in May 1997, a very early example of South-South knowledge transfer in ICTs.

In 1999, he, jointly with three other colleagues, founded InApp Information Technologies, now a CMMI Level 5 IT Services Company with offices in US, Japan and Europe, and a development centre at Technopark, Trivandrum. He was on Sabbatical to ICFOSS as its founding Director during 2011–15.

Satish Babu was one of the earliest users and passionate advocates of the Internet from Kerala. He started using the Internet in 1993 at the Hull University, UK. He was a part of the IndiaLink programme of the Indian Social Institute, Delhi, which attempted to connect NGOs through email on the Internet in the mid-1990s. In 1994, he set up and ran the Trivandrum node of the IndiaLink email network, called FishNet (fishnet.frlht.ernet.in), which is perhaps the earliest free, open, public email service in Kerala. FishNet used the Waffle/UUCP BBS software on an MS-DOS PC, and provided free email services to anyone equipped with an acoustic modem. The uplink to the Internet was to ERNET in Bangalore, through FRLHT, a Bangalore-based NGO. FishNet continued its services until Internet was made available in Kerala through local dialup in 1996.