SERVAL GROUP

The Team

The Serval Project – The Team
A project is only as good as its team – and we here at The Serval Project have a good team – some paid, some students, some volunteers. All are treated with respect, friendliness, and a sense of all being in this together. This creates a working atmosphere where creativity and hard work combine with friendliness, humour, and a sense of fun that makes coming in to the lab a real joy.

Senior Development Team 
The Senior Development Team is responsible for the core oversight of the software direction & development, as well as providing a leadership role for Serval’s many project students, helping them to develop their skills and become integral and productive members of the team.

Paul Gardner-Stephen : Technical Architect, Co-founder & Inspiration for The Serval Project.


Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen is Rural, Remote & Humanitarian Telecommunications at Flinders University where, from the Resilient Networks Laboratory, (aka The Batcave), he leads the Serval Project, which was created in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He has more than 15 years experience as a systems and network administrator and has been writing and selling software from age 17, which helped support his mobile telecommunications habit (an NEC P3 with half-duplex speaker-phone about 6 hours battery life) as an undergraduate student in the mid 1990s when cell phones were still uncommon in Australia. He is author of 64NET, which was sold in three continents before being released as free software. He created the world’s first real and wearable shoe phone a la Maxwell Smart, and then legally wore it on a commercial flight into post-9/11 USA, (much to the amusement of airport security personnel along the way).
Since March 2010 he has been working tirelessly to realise the vision of enabling all people to communicate. He sees the way to achieve this to enable the latent capabilities of low-cost consumer electronics devices to automatically form useful communications networks, enabling communications for free or at low cost and in locations where it has not previously been feasible for whatever reason. He wears khaki, and is the star of many media appearances. He is just as nice as he seems, despite being smarter than just about everyone.

Romana Challans : IEEE Liaison, UX/UI Lead, Web Developer, and co-founder of The Serval Project. 
Romana’s experience as Technical Training Coordinator at Motorola Australia Software Centre, and her work as a freelance web designer, have added both corporate experience and understanding of user interfaces. She is passionate about Open Source advocacy and accessibility to technology, and all the advantages that it can bring for all people regardless of location or economic situation. This passion led to her helping found another not for profit group over 12 years ago, ITShareSA, involved in recycling computer hardware towards low income individuals, groups, communities, and at times, other countries, using Open Source software. There has been a field trial where we converted her wheelchair into a portable Mobile Phone Tower as a proof of concept. She is now involved with Serval’s involvement with the standards process of 802.11 within the IEEE. This means a lot of travelling, and her wheelchair probably has more frequent flyer points than most people. She has a bad habit of quoting from poetry and geek lexicons like Monty Python equally, and always wishes for just one more cup of tea for the day.

Jennifer Hampton : Project Manager.
Jenny has 12 years of experience in software engineering and product development. Her roles have gained her experience in all phases of the software development lifecycle across testing, development and project management. Her project management experience in particular spans over 7 years. Jenny’s objective as a project manager is to deliver projects which achieve a high level of customer satisfaction in both the end product and the project execution. She, Paul, Jeremy, and Romana attended Flinders University together. She and Romana went on to work at Motorola Australia Software Centre. She is tasked with making sure we all meet our milestones, and manages to keep us all to it with intelligence, firmness, grace, humour, and more than occasional chocolate bribery. Despite Romana quoting from most geek lexicons fluently, she is the undisputed Red Dwarf champion.

Jeremy Lakeman : Senior Software Engineer and Quality Manager. 
Jeremy brings with him 12 years of commercial experience developing software, primarily for the financial services industry. Jeremy’s interests lie in architecting and implementing novel software solutions to solve real problems, and thus was readily drawn to Serval Project when approached by the founder, Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen, whom he has known from University days.  He has been  applying his skills at the Serval Project, identifying and implementing solutions to progress development and integration of the Serval BatPhone software, as well as providing a leadership role for Serval’s many project students, helping them to develop their skills and become integral and productive members of the team. Jeremy is prone to casually solving hugely insurmountable problems by frowning, typing, and mentioning briefly the issue is resolved, before moving on to conquer the next impossible task. He is easily bribed with chocolate, and is regarded as eno