Richard Heeks is one of the first academics I discovered when I started to learn about development issues online, and I have continued to read what he writes.
Even in the early days I was hoping to make connections between academic research and our on the ground activities. Richard was encouraging about this. He suggested that it might be a suitable research area for one of his next group of masters students, but when the time came to choose their topics they all had other interests. He was very encouraging about the work I was starting to do for the Oke-Ogun Community Development Network (OCDN) and the Information Centre at Ago-Are. He kindly gave me some helpful booklets he had written which I was able to pass to Chief Adejumo, the chairman of OCDN. It seems that we are overlapping anew with a shared interest in climate change.
We first met Face to Face at an Africa Gathering event, and again at ICTD2010.