Bridge mark: arch bridge, the Olubridge wordmark accentOlubridge

The team

Small team, deep community roots

We are three people with ties to Ebonyi State and a shared conviction that the Izzi, Ezaa, and Ikwo languages deserve a first dataset. Community trust is the hardest thing to build in this work. We started there.

  • Team member one

    Founder

    Placeholder bio for team member one. This person grew up in Ebonyi State and has spent years working at the intersection of community trust and language documentation. Two sentences; replace with real copy when ready.

    founder@olubridge.org

  • Team member two

    Co-founder, ML and product

    Placeholder bio for team member two. This person brings a background in speech processing and has contributed to open-data projects elsewhere in Nigeria. Two sentences; replace with real copy when ready.

    ml@olubridge.org

  • Team member three

    Community and field lead

    Placeholder bio for team member three. This person coordinates elder interviews, consent processes, and logistics across Izzi, Ezaa, and Ikwo communities. Two sentences; replace with real copy when ready.

    field@olubridge.org

Advisors and partners we work with

We are building the relationships this work requires. Each of these people or organisations brings something the team cannot generate alone: academic legitimacy, field methodology, denominational access, or precedent from comparable documentation projects.

  • We are building relationships with a linguist advisor from Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike (AE-FUNAI) or the Linguistic Association of Nigeria (LAN), whose Language Documentation Institute trains community documenters and strengthens grant applications that require a named linguist co-investigator.
  • We are building relationships with a mentor from Masakhane, the African NLP community that has produced over 300 translation models across 50+ languages and explicitly supports community-led, non-extractive projects.
  • We are building relationships with a diocesan contact in Abakaliki, where church networks have documented and printed in these languages for decades and hold relationships with elder speakers across many communities.
  • We are building relationships with a collaborator at Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, which already runs a Nigeria campaign and hosts Living Dictionaries that could serve as a public-facing home for Izzi, Ezaa, Ikwo, and Korring lexical material.