Satish Babu

Satish Babu (Sathees Babu Chellikattuveli Sivanandan, 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, an NGO of small-scale artisanal fishers of south India; a co-founder and President of InApp Information Technologies; and is associated with international and national 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 served as the Interim Chair of the Asian, Australasian and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of ICANN in Sep 2016, and further as elected Chair for three terms. In October 2021, ICANN announced that it was honouring Satish Babu with the Dr Tarek Kemal Capacity Building Award. In 2022, he was appointed to the 15-member At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) of ICANN. In 2025, Satish was appointed as a member of IEEE's newly-constituted Global Policy Caucus that oversees the harmonization of policy positions across the different units of IEEE.