SALT LAKE CITY — When Danilo Campos was exposed to a computer for the first time as a 7-year-old child, he was captivated by the device and transformed into a “geek.” A family friend had brought one home from her job, “and I just thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world. You couldn’t pull me away from it.”
Born in Puerto Rico and raised mostly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Campos was the son of a single mother with limited financial resources who became enthralled to the point where he pleaded with his mom for three years to buy a computer. Over time, she was able to save $2,000 to purchase a new computer for their home. He called it the turning point in his childhood.
“It completely changed what I did with my everyday life,” Campos told an audience of more than 100 people seated in the main event hall of The Falls Event Center at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City. “There was so much I could experiment with and create inside of the computer that I couldn’t put it down.”
He was one of the featured speakers at the Broadband Tech Summit hosted by the Utah Broadband Outreach Center in the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. The center is a state program focused on mapping available broadband services and promoting the development of additional infrastructure in Utah.
Today, Danilo is the technical director for social impact at GitHub — a San Francisco-based software firm, and he credits the availability of technology for giving him a way out of poverty and into a world of infinite possibilities. He said his career in technology could not have happened without ready access to broadband.
“Because of the internet, everything about the 21st century made real intuitive sense to me,” he said. “That is how I wandered into the career I have today.”
Campos said for young people to meaningfully prepare for their future, they must be participants in the technology that will be the key component in the development of the advances of tomorrow.
“(Teenagers) really grasp this (concept) on an intuitive level, they just get it,” he said. “They see what’s possible with it. I see a huge opportunity to take these young people who have been ‘swimming in the sauce’ of what the 21st century means and give them as solid an ongoing connection to it as possible.”
He said that supporting them in their own intuitive, self-directed explorations would allow them to do interesting things as long as they have access to broadband. He said communities and civic leaders must take the initiative to make broadband access a priority for everyone no matter what their economic circumstance.
Besides speakers, the one-day event focused on how advances in technology are supported by a strong broadband infrastructure, with topics including the Internet of Things, virtual reality, internet identity, research advances and public safety, as well as digital inclusion — a mandate the state is taking very seriously, said GOED executive director Val Hale.
