Summary: Zinnia Ambapardiwala is a physics graduate, trichologist, hairdresser, and system administrator. She is currently the technical coordinator of Pad.ma.
Sanjay Bhangar is a writer and software developer who lives in Mumbai. He is a founder of CAMP (
http://camputer.org), and has been involved with the pad.ma project since its inception. He is a big believer in the open-source software development model. He is currently working on a few web-based projects including a web-to-print publishing platform, a resource site for theatre in India, and online mapping and indexing tools.
Jan Gerber is an artist, filmmaker and software developer from Berlin. He develops platforms for the production and distribution of video material (v2v.cc,
0xdb.org, pad.ma,
dictionaryofwar.org) and runs informal cinemas and publicly funded events on questions of intellectual property and piracy (
piratecinema.org,
oil21.org). As a co-founder of
0x2620.org, he is currently working on Pan.do/ra, the next version of Pad.ma and
0xdb.org.
Sebastian W. Lütgert is an artist, programmer and writer. He lives and works in Berlin. He has co-founded a self-organized institution for artistic research in media technology (
http://bootlab.org), a cinema for movies downloaded from the internet (
http://piratecinema.org) and a non-profit organization for open-source software development (
http://0x2620.org). He has initiated various projects dealing with copyright and cinema, and is currently working on a film on capitalism, set in Dubai.
Namita A. Malhotra is a writer, researcher and filmmaker with the Alternative Law Forum (
http://www.altlawforum.org). She lives and works in a not-big-city, Bangalore. She works on technology, legality and power and is soon (hopefully) finishing a film on video pornography and a monograph on law, affect and image.
Ashok Sukumaran is an artist whose interests are in archaeologies of media, and in what haunts or underlies network forms and material distributions. Recent subjects in his work include electricity, cycle rickshaws, sea trade, and "the neighbour". His work takes the form of public projects, exhibitions, films, lectures, and long-term collaborations via CAMP (
http://camputer.org), which he co-founded in 2007.
PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use. The initiators of PAD.MA conceptualized this archive as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video-making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip. The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing", and contextualization: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of "writing" on top of the image material. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of
oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.
http://pad.ma/ 
