According to the ITU (2017) Africa has 739 million individuals without access to internet infrastructure. Other continents are better off, but also have severe lack of access to information. Many of these communities are covered by terrestrial TV signals. Governments are sponsoring set top boxes for digital signal migration. Wikimedia ZA has made a deal with the South African broadcasting agency Sentech, to broadcast Wikipedia updates via digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T2) . Once the technology is shown to work, it can be deployed worldwide.

I will be here working on this, with spare Raspberry Pi-based set top boxes, and DVB-T2 sticks. You can also work on Debian/Ubuntu as the drivers are easily installed.

Our goal for the Hackathon is simple: develop and test and encoder and decoder of data signals. We have a pile of technical specs and already 4 people working on it. Please monitor the shared etherpad for links, here: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikidvb

If you are interested in hacking at this with us, please add your details to the etherpad, or subscribe to this topic or by introducing yourself in a comment below. Please spread the word if you know any Linux driver or DVB people.