Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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Open Source and the Promise of Sustainable Nutrition Security

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Jerry and I had a great conversation about open sourcing of agricultural scientific models, such as those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their climate change reports. As it turns out, these models were originally developed decades ago and many are written in Fortran !

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A Call for Millions: Ending the Global Book Famine for the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Publishers already contribute most of their ebooks to us for free, but The Treaty allows for crowdsourcing books at scale through a Napster-inspired model (but legal!). We have a new business model. Free service with a “pay what you can” request (like Wikipedia’s) is a sustainable nonprofit model. We can scale quickly.

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Bringing Millions of Books to Billions of People: Making the Book Truly Accessible

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

I believe it is a combination of copyright exceptions and business model innovations. The second group of enablers of the brighter future are business model innovations. Technology advances have created the opportunity for many of us to experiment with one or more of these models.

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Caltech: Founding Values

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The need to get practical, to find a business model that provides massive financial return to investors, means that many great ideas get put back on the shelf when the inventors realize that they aren’t a fit for the venture capital model.

Syria 196
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DIAGRAM Center

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

We are also building a content model for making images more accessible. The intention is to define an XML content model which will make it easier to present alternatives to the original graphical content for persons who are blind or print disabled.

Images 194
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How Open Source Sparks Innovation and Advances Social Good

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

We always ask ourselves how we can apply technology in new ways to improve people’s lives, and we believe that the open source model helps spark creativity and more technology-for-good ventures. It allows us to build and improve upon the knowledge of predecessors, as well as to make knowledge available for future users and developers.

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Congressional Testimony Statement before the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

In my prepared statement, I explained why well-balanced intellectual property laws inspire technology innovation and social good, and described how our Bookshare initiative models the good that copyright exceptions can create. And new technology and new operational models are needed to do far more good with the same or fewer resources.

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