Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 15, 2011

One of my very first meetings in Nairobi, Kenya, was with John Kipchumbah (Kipp) and Philip Thigo of the Innovation Program of the Social Development Network. Kipp explained that they wanted to take a broad approach to improving human rights, and so had expanded into other areas in the social sector.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 1, 2014

The cost of prototyping and deploying new technology tools is now extremely low and data has the potential to accelerate social progress in areas ranging from poverty to human rights, education, health, and the environment. Our role as technologists is to provide the tools that empower them to do so. Let me explain further.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 29, 2018

Betsy is a recognized social entrepreneur who has dedicated much of her career to changing the world with software. Helped environmental leaders design, manage, monitor, and evaluate global conservation projects and campaigns with the first open source conservation project management tool. I can assure you that I am not retiring.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 25, 2014

Whether it’s software, hardware, or even biotech, the cost of prototyping and deploying new tools, then adapting them and iterating, is now extremely low. We build software applications focused exclusively on addressing unmet social needs and see hundreds of ideas for tech applications for good for each one that we can create.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 16, 2014

My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. To do so, we definitely need your help. billion poor and unbanked.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 28, 2014

Beyond debating the stimulating topics of major talks—such as Edward Snowden’s appearance by telepresence robot and t he response to it by Rick Ledgett , the Deputy Director of the NSA—I spent much of my time speaking about my favorite topic: technology for social good. Of course, that included getting new ideas for software for social good!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 28, 2014

A passionate technology-for-good advocate, Gerardo has made major contributions to Benetech’s social mission since he joined us over four years ago. He oversaw the development of numerous products and services that allow us to drive social empowerment through technology across all our programs.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 19, 2013

At Benetech, our goal is to create positive social change through technology. We hope you’ll consider them: our ability to sustain our ongoing efforts, while exploring and creating new technology to meet pressing social needs, depends on the generosity of people like you! Benetech is committed to making our website accessible to all.

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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. But what about everybody else? The time has never been better to think 10X bigger!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 13, 2014

Yet, when humanitarian and social justice workers venture into the developing world to gather sensitive information, elementary privacy protections are often neglected. They are based in a country where the LGBT community faces a hostile social climate and state-sanctioned harassment.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 1, 2011

Benetech Truths 1 We are committed to social change through technology. Benetech is a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization developing innovative technology solutions with a primary goal of positive social change rather than profit. We solve social problems that otherwise would not be solved. 2 We get stuff done.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2014

Tremendous shifts in data availability, access, and use are rapidly transforming our lives, and numbers debates are taking center stage in the development, philanthropy, impact investing, and social enterprise sectors. Here’s Benetech’s outlook: we advocate for a human-centered approach to data in the social sector.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 13, 2016

He’s a geek (former Microsoft Research guy) who is making the case that technology doesn’t make the kind of social impact it claims to deliver. Toyama offers up strong criticisms as well as constructive advice about how to best apply technology to social problems. Why is it in the social sector we think it is so easy?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

As a matter of fact, the funding for Benetech to start Bookshare and our Martus human rights software project came from a successful spinoff of our first social enterprise, the Arkenstone reading machines, which we sold to a for-profit for roughly $5 million. We used it to review our planning as we wrapped up this move.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

But, we can approach human behavior change from a social perspective. Zerofootprint shows what you can do with real data to influence meaningful social change. Suddenly, we have a tool to focus on the most wasteful schools, and to help all schools improve their energy efficiency.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

We realized that the most effective tool to fight human rights abuse was the truth. Our breakthrough in the conception of Martus came in 2000, when I was looking to expand Benetech to new frontiers of social good beyond our origins—helping disabled people access books in what is now our Global Literacy program.

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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.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 15, 2010

Her students at Rice University have been busy inventing new tools and equipment for global health. I am convinced that there are many exciting social enterprises here. Clayton Christensen of Harvard in an article entitled Disruptive Innovation for Social Change has noted the need for disruptive innovations in health care.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

However, technology is transforming innovation at its core and our team at Benetech does quite well in leveraging this “innovation at warp speed” for social good. Technology for social change is needed more and more. Don’t get me wrong: I love writing my updates. We’re also expanding our efforts to help more people in the U.S.,

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 14, 2013

Unfortunately, most companies won’t pursue projects without the promise of big profits and the people who need tech tools the most often can’t afford them. Wofford and the conversation I witnessed between these two economists at TED reminded me of how this is such an exciting time for social enterprises—and especially for us at Benetech.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 10, 2013

This post originally appeared as part of an online debate about How Big Data Can Have a Social Impact, which the Harvard Business Review Blog Network hosted jointly with the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. But can Big Data also create positive social change? Big Data is all the rage in Silicon Valley.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 28, 2013

We have the technology, we have the content, and now we have the legal framework to make it possible for every person with a print disability on the planet to get access to the books they need for education, employment and social inclusion! This Treaty provides a tremendous tool to accelerate that work.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 8, 2011

Our team has been thinking hard about scaling positive social impact of technology work. Led by Benetech’s VP of Engineering Gerardo Capiel, we will create an online space, SocialCoding4Good, where people in the tech community interested in social causes can volunteer ideas, connections, time and skills.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 13, 2011

I just spent a couple of days in Vancouver with the team at the Public Knowledge Project , a terrific example of an open source social enterprise. A major set of OJS's users are from the developing world: the tools really put the power of expanding knowledge in the hands of scholars!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 22, 2010

The ten days in the UK amazed me with the power of social media in my life. As a tech guy who also plays a social entrepreneur, I often get asked by my SE buddies about what are the practical use of a tool like Twitter. I spend less than 15 minutes a day on social media, but the payoffs are huge! BBC tracks me down!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 11, 2015

This is a recurring question that we get at Benetech about Martus —our free, strongly encrypted tool for secure collection and management of sensitive information, built and provided by the Benetech Human Rights Program. “Your secure software is open source: doesn’t that make it less secure?” Does that make Safe Number One less safe?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 10, 2013

Unfortunately, most companies won’t pursue projects without the promise of big profits and the people who need tech tools the most often can’t afford them.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 15, 2012

As a result, people with disabilities were left behind, facing insurmountable barriers to opportunities in education, employment, and social inclusion. It is the nature of technology to realize immense economies when scale is achieved, but it is the Power of We that drives scale and makes success possible for ultimate social impact.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 3, 2011

The Day aims to raise awareness of disability issues with a focus on the rights of persons with disabilities and the benefits derived from their integration in the social, economic, cultural and political life of their communities. The annual observance of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) is today, December 3rd.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 10, 2011

Next quarter will be our new projects meeting, where we talk about the pipeline of new ideas for Benetech social enterprises. He talked about the opportunities and challenges he sees ahead, especially as technology tools continue to be adopted by more of the human rights community, from cell phones to Facebook.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 18, 2012

We help the human rights movement speak truth to power, because we believe each story of human rights abuse is a tool for justice. Maintain and develop our team's automated data processing and analysis infrastructure (POSIX-environment command line tools built on bash, make, python, and R).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 25, 2007

Social capital formation is a hot topic for me. I want to see us have the same kind of positive environment for social ventures as we have in Silicon Valley for high tech ventures (but they have to make a lot of money), where great social ventures are rewarded with better and lower cost capital.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 10, 2011

Looking ahead to 2012, training NGOs in collection and effective use of data, and developing new technology tools to enable these efforts will be core components of our agenda. 2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We’re deeply grateful for this strong support of our work. and Catherine T.

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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. Forcing tech companies to weaken their products through compelling the creation of backdoors would be a massive step backwards.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 13, 2008

We pretty much exist to adapt technology developed for those "applications with commercial potential" to applications with great social impact and limited commercial potential. If you're a nonprofit, you'll choose to focus on social good. Or, if they did, they would keep focusing on those "applications with commercial potential."

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 15, 2014

As a long-time advocate for a global copyright exception and the founder of Benetech—which I started twenty-five years ago in order to make technology tools to address the needs of people with print disabilities—I was thrilled to become an active player in global diplomacy and witness the adoption and signing of this landmark Treaty.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 12, 2011

I think social entrepreneurship is all about looking at root causes and addressing them: elimination of a disease is a pretty good approach to addressing the root cause instead of just treating symptoms. Today, an estimated 750,000 people are blind and at least 1 million suffer low vision due to trachoma.

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