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Earlier this year, my friend Cristina told me about the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford University.

“The Digital Vision Program is a sabbatical program for technology professionals at Stanford University. The Program was launched on October 1, 2001, with five fellows in the inaugural class. Digital Vision fellows each undertake a project that explores the utility of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in addressing developing world problems.”

I attended one of the DVF seminars in February and was immediately intrigued by the idea of applying information communication technologies in developing countries. At the time, I was furiously developing Soybo, so I was very engaged in thinking how we could utilize high-end computing resources on bandwidth-constrained, low-powered devices such as handhelds and mobile phones.

As I was leaving to document Vienna Teng’s East Coast tour in April, I completed development on version 1.0 of Soybo, and I had applied for the Fellowship. In May, shortly after I returned from Nashville, Tennesse, I learned that I had been selected as a Fellow for the upcoming 2003-2004 school year!

Several months later, on September 11, 2003, the Fellowship officially kicked off with our first meeting in the CSLI building on Panama Street at Stanford. I met some familiar faces in Stuart Gannes and Amy Sanger, the program directory and coordinator of the DVF Program, along with Megan Smith, who was one of the seminar speakers from last year. In addition, I met many of my fellow Fellows for this year, including Michelle, Heather, Brij, Raphael, Joe, Tino, Segeni, Michael, Shuji, and Edguardo. All of them come to the Fellowship with impressive backgrounds and experiences. It’s certainly going to be a fascinating and memorable year.

After introducing one another, a number of the Fellows went on a tour of Stanford. Since I had the luxury of being a former student

Here are some photos from DVF Day One.