Jacques Steyn holds a PhD in language and complex systems, and he received an award for excellence in science from the South African Association for the Advancement of Science (S2A3) for his
Masters Degree. In 1999 he developed the first XML-based general music markup language (http://
www.musicmarkup.info). He was member of the international ISO/MPEG-7 standards workgroup
on metadata for interactive-TV and Multimedia. He was also member of the ISO/MPEG-4 extension
workgroup for music notation (i.e. symbolic music representation). In 1999 and 2000 he was Associate
Professor of Multimedia at the University of Pretoria. Since February 2005 he served as Head of the
School of IT at Monash University's South African campus. Prior to that, for close to a decade, he was
a private consultant in the field of new media, web technologies and multimedia. His interest in ICT4D
began in 1999. In 2006 he established the International Development Informatics Association, which at
the time of writing had its 3rd annual conference. The idea of this book was born from frustration with
the scarcity of well-founded academic research in the field of ICT4D, where media hype seems to reign.