Social Media Convention 2023

Sandra Aceng

Digital Rights and Data Researcher

Sandra Aceng is the Executive Director at Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET). She is a gender and ICT researcher, policy analyst, writer, and Wikimedian. Sandra is an outspoken and energetic woman human rights defender (WHRD) who advocates for the integration of gender perspectives in ICT policy and analyzes threats to free expression in Africa introduced by regulatory initiatives. She is a Global Voices contributor, a 2020 Global Network Initiative (GNI)/Internews Fellow, a 2021 OPTIMA Data-Driven Activism Fellow, and a former Associate Editor at Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Sandra is also the Diversity and Content Generation Lead at the Wikimedia Community User Group where she leads the WikiForHumanRights, WikiForRefugees, and Wiki Loves Earth projects by recruiting, training, coordinating, and mentoring editors and volunteers who participate in online and in-person events that teach participants about Wikipedia skills, community norms, and best practices on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and other identified Wikimedia projects. In 2021, she was the Wiki Indaba 2021 Conference Scholarship Connectivity Fund Lead. Sandra was selected as one of the 40 fellows for the class of 2021 virtual edition of the African School on Internet Governance (AfriSIG). She was a mentor for Wiki Vibrance Project 2022 and was selected as the 2022 Core Organising Team (COT) for the 2022 Wikimania Conference by Wikimedia Foundation.