Steve Song is a Shuttleworth Foundation Telecommunications and Connectedness Fellow. He provides thought leadership on and practical implementations of access to communications infrastructure and its impact on social and economic innovation and growth.

Steve worked at the International Development Research Centre for ten years before joining the Shuttleworth Foundation. At the IDRC he led the centre’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) programmes in Africa. Steve is a former Senior Programme Officer with the Bellanet International Secretariat where his work focused on knowledge management and its implications for international development. Here he also researched open source approaches to collaborative work. He has led a number of knowledge management strategic planning missions and organised workshops throughout Africa and Asia. He has also worked in the area of ICTs and development since 1991 and was involved in the early development of the Internet for the non-profit community in South Africa, including developing some of the first websites for non-profits in the country, and pioneering the first on-line searchable newspaper archive in Africa.

Steve’s background is largely technical having studied Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto and having worked for many years in the computer industry. However, he prefers to refer to himself as a “reformed” technologist. He has traveled extensively in Africa including making a solo trip from Cape Town to Cairo by motorcycle in 1994. Steve’s blog covers a variety of issues that interest him from telecoms in Africa to Open approaches to just about everything, to understanding in general how our lives and livelihoods are being reshaped by telecommunications and the Internet.