High speed Internet access has changed the world immeasurably. A dazzling array of divides have been bridged – from educational and political to cultural and linguistic. Some gaps have not been narrowed, however, and some have been widened. This is particularly true for rural communities in developing countries, where building Internet infrastructures is not economically attractive due to the high cost of reaching users with low purchasing power.

AirJaldi is a social enterprise established in Dharamsala, India with aim of narrowing these gaps. Early in 2005, following the deregulation for outdoor use of WiFi in India , we began our work by helping to create the Dharamsala Community Wireless-Mesh Network in cooperation with the Tibetan Technology Center.

Over the last few years we witnessed a change in the development world. Not only did products become more social in themselves, but the whole process of development became much more transparent. Companies offer open source versions of their products and give access to their data via Application Programming Interfaces or short APIs. Software is being hosted on repositories with social aspects, training material is spread across the social web, people leverage existing social graphs and build products live in the cloud.