Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 13, 2015

So, there's a lot to like in there for me and our campaign for greater accessibility built into future educational technology and content! If producers adopt current industry standards for producing educational materials, materials will be accessible out of the box.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 18, 2012

And, let's follow up Blackout Day with a campaign to pass laws that protect this critically important resource! And we're part of a movement that believes passionately that the Internet is an treasure: a force for equality and economic growth. Don't Break the Internet!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 4, 2015

We've never done a crowdfunding campaign specifically for Bookshare, and tomorrow we'll find out if some of our 350,000 users and their families are able to express their appreciation by helping match these challenge grants.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 12, 2011

Peter is spearheading the wonderful campaign Vision 2020 “The Right to Sight”: a global initiative seeking to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020. In Ghana, I greatly enjoyed meeting Peter Ackland, CEO of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. The good news is that trachoma can effectively be eliminated.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

She hit the world stage most notably as Ireland’s first female president, and has continued to campaign for the world’s most vulnerable people, especially women. The latest Skoll opportunity came along with the recent visit of Mary Robinson to Palo Alto. I want to share just two insights from Mary that made a big impression on me.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 16, 2014

That’s why we were excited to participate in the Skoll Foundation’s second annual Skoll Social Entrepreneurs Challenge , a fundraising campaign committed to strengthening the capacity of organizations like ours to accelerate impact on some of the most critical issues of our time. To do so, we definitely need your help.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

AI was founded in 1961 on the inspiration of British lawyer Peter Benenson, whose article “The Forgotten Prisoners” launched the first Prisoners of Conscience campaign, which ignited overwhelming global support and marked the birth of AI.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

Since people with disabilities tend to be the poorest of the poor, it seems odd to campaign to hobble libraries that serve only this community. But, we strongly object to removing the safety net of an effective copyright exception in the United States while we are still early in the born accessibility campaign.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

The publishers were asking for support of an approach that the WBU and Bookshare had campaigned hard against in Marrakesh. They were holding an international meeting of blindness groups around the campaign to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty in London during the days before the Geneva meeting. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

For the last three years she's been leading the charge for the Born Accessible campaign. However, building Bookshare into the world's biggest library for people with disabilities wasn't enough social good for Robin.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 14, 2008

Jody Williams was bold and outspoken (I assume, as usual) and funny: she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the campaign to ban landmines. Al Gore has been working with Jeff Skoll for years, and their partnership has led to the movie an Inconvenient Truth and now the Alliance for Climate Protection.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

It's part of our campaign to upgrade the quality of all of our Bookshare content, and to let our users know exactly what we're doing. We've now made it easy to report quality issues with Bookshare books, and we have a new wiki-style webpage where all of the reports are posted and updated as the issues are resolved.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 14, 2013

He began a campaign, sending love letters, love songs, and reassurance. One night they listened to the Fellowship of the Ring movie on the phone until 4 in the morning. By October, he declared he loved her. She was ecstatic but fearful he was too good to be true.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 9, 2018

Together with the World Blind Union and other campaigners, we set out to get a global treaty that would not only replicate the U.S. The next challenge we’re working on is to bring this incredible library to the rest of the world. Remember how crucial the Section 121 copyright exception was to creating Bookshare?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 14, 2013

For example, the Giving Pledge campaign that began with efforts by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett is encouraging the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. In addition, now more than ever, those who have benefited greatly from technology are giving back.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 19, 2006

He has been described as the pioneer of Talking Books in India, and had been campaigning for a copyright law change to make it easier to provide access to accessible books. Visually impaired his entire life, he was a tireless advocate for the blind and visually impaired as well as a shining role model.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

We just dedicated our first crowd-funding campaign, Bookshare for Veterans —part of the Skoll Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurs Challenge on CrowdRise—to this goal and are enhancing our outreach to veterans who need access to books and information. We’re also expanding our efforts to help more people in the U.S.,

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2015

It gave us the opportunity to conduct for the first time a sizeable outreach campaign in education, provided us with informative user feedback and case studies, and supported the development of Bookshare’s initial K-12 collection. This revised project included the conversion of books into accessible formats and working with multiple schools.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 29, 2010

That shortchanges Larry’s background: he was the key leader in the campaign to eliminate smallpox in India, cofounded the Seva Foundation and a couple of high tech companies, and was most recently running Google.org.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 14, 2005

Our team has contributed critical information that has helped Human Rights Watch with its campaign to bring the former dictator of Chad to justice. Benetech helps drive indictment of a former dictator. This is a great example of the power of information technology to advance the cause of victims of gross human rights abuses.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

I was delighted to speak at the November 15th joint plenary session on “The Right to Read” campaign to achieve a world where published books are accessible and available to all individuals who are blind or have other disabilities. In my talk, I highlighted three global movements towards increasing accessible publishing.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 27, 2008

People sometimes decry the infiltration of "business approaches" into the nonprofit sector, but when you visit an incredibly poor country like India and see such a systematic social enterprise campaigning successfully against needless blindness. Certainly, this is an example of where it works well.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 30, 2009

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America 4. The best part about receiving your letter is knowing Bookshare notices how much I try to send you well proofread books and that my dedication is as unflagging as my health allows. ** Volunteer Requests: 1. Rural Nurse 2. Celtic Myths and Legends 3.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 16, 2018

We have started a campaign to put ourselves out of business. Furthermore, instead of having to scan many books at $100 to $5000 apiece, our library now gets five to 10 thousand books each month for free, in a standard format that costs us pennies per book added to our collection. But wait, there’s more!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 28, 2012

Kevin and the SEA today launched an Initiative To Protect the Meaning of Social Enterprise , supporting the efforts of our peers with Social Enterprise UK in their "NotInOurName" campaign. Here is the letter I'm sending to the USPTO supporting their initial recommendation against granting this registered trademark in the U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 11, 2017

Systems Entrepreneurship is on the Rise Jeff Walker has been making the case for what he calls "systems entrepreneurship" at Harvard's Kennedy School, Skoll and in a new SSIR article.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 11, 2013

We’re actively participating in initiatives such as the Taproot Foundation Pro Bono Summit and the A Billion+ Change campaign , and we’re working closely with tech giants like HP and VMware to match and structure the right opportunities for their engineering teams to collaborate with our Project Partners.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2016

And so we campaigned for the Marrakesh Treaty. We want to leapfrog the current unjust equilibrium (blind people are read to, but mostly not) to a new place where the widespread availability of cheap mobile phones and MP3 players can be harnessed. It makes a copyright exception like the U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

His job: running and tracking national communications campaigns for Bookshare and maintaining relationships with Kindergarten through 12th grade district administrators, assistive technology coordinators and special education teachers. Stan, who recently completed his MBA from Duke, is now the interim education program manager for Bookshare.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 15, 2004

They've built a strong PR campaign using soap opera actors, as well as a product line made by their clients. Vera has been adding senior management and doing a terrific job of building a brand around Renascer and Chiquinio, a stick figure child image that represents the poor children that Renascer serves.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 21, 2008

During our recent campaign to recruit new team members, Benetech has attracted qualified candidates by offering more than just good pay and a pleasant work environment. She came to us with some very well-developed ideas on how to reach out to our educational users.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 13, 2011

The way that we can best honor the victims of past human rights violations is to document and share their stories in support of the campaign to drive change today—by seeking reforms, ending impunity and if at all possible, securing justice. Overstated claims hurt the cause of the human rights movement over the long term.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 18, 2010

Veronique Aubert, deputy director of Amnesty's Africa program, said in a statement that Chebeya had campaigned to uphold the rights of the constitution and democracy in the DRC parliament and had been harassed by authorities in the past. Aubert called for a full government investigation of Chebeya’s death as did Human Rights Watch.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 19, 2009

In some cases, the information is intended for use in court cases or international prosecution, to support a human rights report, or advocacy campaign. Other times it is collected to record the human rights environment in a given context, perhaps a conflict or post-conflict situation.

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