Steven Mansour has been a fixture of the Montreal, Canadian and global tech landscapes since the early aughts. His work's focus has ebbed and flowed through broad tech, policy and ethics spheres including online privacy, broadband accessibility, digital equity, copyright reform, discrimination in the tech world, censorship circumvention, knowledge transfer, community management, open-source advocacy, social listening and engagement, low-cost wireless networking and many others. He was an early pioneer in the local community wireless networking scene, trained researchers and journalists in developing countries on knowledge transfer and censorship circumvention, helped build the world's largest federated scientific social network under the aegis of UNESCO, ICSU and McGill University, and was an instrumental initial stakeholder in the launch of Measurement Lab, Google's de-facto broadband speed measurement tool. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Montreal Gazette, Ha'aretz, Ottawa Citizen, CBC Radio and elsewhere. He has spoken, presented or lead workshops at a number of conferences such as the World Science Forum (Budapest), LEAD Digital (Singapore), National Conference for Media Reform (Memphis), Allied Media Conference (Detroit), Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Les Archives Nationales du Québec (Montreal).
His current areas of interest are the effects of Presence on knowledge transfer and education within Virtual Reality, Mapping broadband accessibility, availability and demand within rural and underserved demographics, and the future of democracy and civic engagement in an increasingly digital world. Steven is an engineering school drop-out but holds a Theoretical PhD in Astrophysics.
