I strive towards a fair open society where all people on the planet have access to the body knowledge we have accumulated over the past few thousand years. The answer came with the printing press to distribute knowledge that was in the hands of a few elite but the answer today is getting everyone an affordable broadband connection to the Internet. Let's make sure that its affordable for the lowest 20% of income earners.I have been working for the past 15 years carrying out research on technologies that have the potential to provide access to poorly connected regions. I have been humbled by the tenacity and resilience of rural communities in Zambia and South Africa that have maintained wireless networks in rural villages and townships in spite of unsurmountable odds. To amplify the capability of communities to grow affordable connectivity, we need to open up more free wireless spectrum and provide more open source connectivity solutions to stimulate unfettered creativity in this space.I have helped design and build South Africa's first rural wireless mesh network, built an indoor 49 radio wireless mesh simulator (one of 3 in the world), published widely on mesh networks, rural connectivity and Internet architecture for rural or poorly serviced areas often trapped behind slow Internet links.My current interests lie in building community networks, hosting our own cloud servers in community-owned networks and using abandoned or unused frequency bands that can be shared for Internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places - TV frequencies (white spaces) being the current best examples of this. This field is growing and I think this is just the beginning of a wave of changes that will rock the way we have managed wireless spectrum essentially trapped in 1930s thinking.http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~djohnson/ (Personal Website)