Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 3, 2013

At Benetech, we agree that braille is an essential literacy tool and that every child who needs it has the right to be taught braille. One major roadblock is the affordability of braille reading tools. We also know that braille materials must be far more available to braille readers of all ages in order to realize their full benefits.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2014

This reality changed when both Kevin and Sophia learned about the accessible online library Bookshare , an initiative of Silicon Valley technology nonprofit Benetech. But we’re also a nonprofit with a social mission to empower individuals in complex and often difficult circumstances. Data without context has little value.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Delivering my opening remarks at the Martus'' 10th Anniversary A decade later, in 2003, Benetech —the nonprofit tech company I founded and lead—launched our Human Rights Program to address this very question. We realized that the most effective tool to fight human rights abuse was the truth. Martus, we decided, would be that tool.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 1, 2011

Benetech is a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization developing innovative technology solutions with a primary goal of positive social change rather than profit. Benetech has a record of success in securing funding, creating partnerships, and delivering products and services that are useful tools for the social sector.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 13, 2014

In his January 17, 2014 speech on NSA reforms , President Obama stated: "As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control."

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 8, 2015

We are Silicon Valley’s deliberately nonprofit software company. Benetech is organized as a nonprofit, but run like a business. We must help ensure that every report of abuse is a tool for justice. You’ve come to the right place: Benetech.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 10, 2011

The Read2Go application was developed by Bookshare’s parent nonprofit Benetech in partnership with Shinano Kenshi Co., Our Bookshare members will also get access to additional features such as study tools, images and multiple languages as the application develops.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 23, 2014

Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice. With these tools, our goal is to make the defenders of human rights stronger in their fight against injustice and abuse. Can we help stimulate the creation of far more technology-for-good ventures?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 28, 2013

We are a high tech organization that is not organized as a for-profit company, but instead as a nonprofit charitable corporation working to ensure technology serves all of humanity. This Treaty provides a tremendous tool to accelerate that work. For years, we have been working to end the worldwide book famine.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 17, 2014

As a different kind of Silicon Valley tech company—a nonprofit with a pure focus on social good—our goal is to see that the best of technology gets applied to social needs left unaddressed by for-profit businesses. It’s because our mission depends on a balanced intellectual property system that encourages innovation. copyright law.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

We may be a nonprofit, but we’re also a tech company: in ten years, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing today! With each of the projects we launch, we plan for at least three successful exit options. It’s a great resource for organizations that are engaged in spinning off sustainable projects, or that are considering similar strategies.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 19, 2013

a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the independence of people with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology. However, we know that many others can progress and become tools that help countless people. We’ve partnered with Knowbility, Inc. ,

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

In fact, we’re doing so well in that respect that I get to engage more and more in new opportunities to advance our nonprofit mission—but less in writing my updates. You see, we want to be able to fail often and well, so we can ultimately launch successful tools that help millions of people.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 1, 2016

Whatever the power of search engines or social networks, it’s really the smartphone that is the most incredible tool for tracking our every move and activity. My nonprofit creates the Martus software for human rights activists to securely store their sensitive information (via encryption). and globally.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 8, 2011

All interested nonprofits or social enterprises will be able to leverage SocialCoding4Good by posting their open source software development projects for social change and inviting volunteers to work on them. with the tools to teach reading to adolescent and adult beginning readers, such as those with developmental disabilities.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 10, 2013

That’s what inspired me to start Benetech , a nonprofit tech company, over 20 years ago. Last month we launched a new feature for Bookshare that allows students to read books within a web browser, instead of needing additional software or tools. We don’t know if the student ever gets past Chapter 1.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 5, 2010

Make it an indispensable tool for people with disabilities, their families, educators, rehab professionals and the assistive and mainstream technology industries. The biggest enemy of a Clearinghouse is irrelevancy. Specific comments on the proposed Chairman’s Awards.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

Digital and mobile communications are changing the rules about social networks, intellectual property, and the availability of big data, with an overall blurring of the boundaries between state, for-profits, and nonprofits. In my contribution to Ron’s book, I discuss the framework that guides us at Benetech, the technology nonprofit I lead.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 23, 2008

nonprofit to have a China branch, but truly amazing that it's been there for twenty years. We started our visit in Hong Kong, visiting the three main nonprofits there serving the blind. In addition, Hong Kong passed a copyright exemption just in the last year, and the leaders in Hong Kong are considering how to utilize this new tool.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 19, 2008

Since these groups are all connected with a common mission around the environment (and are nonprofits), we don't have anti-trust issues! I'm hopeful that we can design tools to make it easy to share information while designating certain data as being confidential to the group creating it.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 11, 2013

The staff at Benetech , the nonprofit tech company I lead, recently came together to answer this question: “What values define our identity and drive our work?” For many in the nonprofit space, being “flexible” and “getting stuff done” don’t always go hand in hand. This post originally appeared on CSRwire Talkback.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 4, 2007

I found Bookshare's interesting history on its Web site's About Us section: "Benetech, a new kind of nonprofit enterprise, is sponsoring the Bookshare initiative. Benetech melds the mission and heart of social activism with the powerful methods and tools of the technology community.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 31, 2004

My best thoughts came from thinking on debt, listening to people like Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund and Tim Freundlich of Calvert. If we had a project that required significant capital assets, such as tooling or a big investment on server infrastructure, we'd have a good case for debt. That's pretty interesting.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2016

The difference is that the social entrepreneur pursues change at scale primarily as a tool for social justice, not private enrichment. They put most nonprofits in the direct action without systems change box: groups that do a good (or even excellent) job of delivering services under the existing system. Credit: Martin, Roger L.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Benetech's newest project is a software tool called Miradi that helps environmental practitioners design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects to more effectively meet the needs of global biodiversity. This response is a measure of how eager the environmental field is for a tool that helps better manage projects. Not Benetech!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 22, 2012

Mark Lind-Hanson I have been involved in nonprofit administrative and development work for a decade and a half, and came to Bookshare in the summer of 2010 as a volunteer. I have been working with image description since the project began, first doing QA for the Poet tool and now involved in writing and editing the illustration captions.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

At Benetech he’s learning about the nonprofit world and making contacts that he’ll use when he launches his next business, after he finishes his MBA at Babson College. She hopes to use the tools she learned at Benetech – including new programming languages, codes and statistics – to work on human rights projects around the world.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 30, 2011

Organized by the nonprofit group Access and sponsored by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Skype, Mozilla and other major tech companies, the conference brought together business leaders, policy makers and online activists, especially from the Arabic-speaking world. We talk about values-based approaches to helping activists. How do we tell the truth?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 7, 2013

It was so gratifying to see firsthand how Martus , a free and open-source software tool developed by Benetech, is empowering people to be the change they wish to see. The balance comes from unrestricted donations to Benetech as a cool overall nonprofit organization!]

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