Aida Mahmutovic

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Project Manager, BIRN BiH

Aida joined Detektor (BIRN BiH) team in April 2021. She is based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Aida began her career in Internet governance in 202 at the Center for e-Governance Development in Ljubljana, Slovenia as an intern. In 2012 she was promoted to project coordinator. Her field of experience has been related to Internet governance and human rights for over ten years now. She was a programme manager at the One World Platform (OWP) where she led Internet rights and women’s rights projects. This included international projects by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), such as “End violence: Women Rights and Safety Online”, “Local Actions to Secure Internet Rights”, and the global “Take Back The Tech” campaign.

She worked as an external consultant for DotSensei (Bulgaria), collaborated on the protestos.org by Article19 and TecticalTech,   and was a digital copywriter for Greenpeace. In 2017, she organised the Balkan School on Internet Governance, the first IG school in the region. Since 2016, she has worked on Geneva Internet Platform’s Digital Watch Observatory as a content co-creator and curator, covering global developments on privacy and data protection and cultural diversity, and later gender rights online and migration and technology.

Since 2012, she has actively participated in the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum. In 2015, Aida led the organisation of the first Internet governance forum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH IGF) after a five-year gap while working for OWP. She was involved in the process for three consecutive years. In 2023, as part of Detektor team, Aida re-initiated Internet governance forum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH IGF) after a five-year gap.

In 2014, she was selected by the UN Secretary General to serve a three-year term on the UN’s Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) of the Internet Governance Forum. She served as executive committee member of the South Eastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance (SEEDIG) and as a member of the organising committee for the Regional Internet Forum.

Aida is a DiploFoundation alumnus. She co-authored the GisWatch BiH country report (2014) on digital surveillance, “End Violence: Women’s Rights and Safety Online (2015)”, and “Cybersecurity Governance and Gender in the Western Balkans” and for the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) (2021), “Online actions, offline harms: Case studies on gender and cybersecurity in the Western Balkans”.

Currently at Detektor she manages projects related to misinformation and foreign malign influence, transitional justice, and digital rights all in relation to human rights and the rule of law.

Apart from Bosnian, her mother tongue, she speaks English, Spanish, French, and Slovenian. Aida has visited 35 countries world-wide and is still counting.