Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I just got back from the ATIA conference, which included meetings of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) committees. ATIA is one of the biggest assistive technology conferences of the year and we had many exciting conversations about Bookshare.org for Education (B4E, our $32 million five year project to deliver accessible books to every student with a print disability in the U.S.). Betsy Burgess, Susie McKinnon and I spent lots of time talking to state agencies, universities and teachers about B4E. It was a blast, given that we've more than quadrupled the number of students we're serving in less than four months! Plus, Bookshare.org just past 36,000 books on-line, and 37,000 will likely happen within a month. Right after the award for B4E, I gave a keynote at the NCTI conference in DC that went over well. The full talk should be available soon, but eSchoolNews has a short version up on their website . I'm looking forward to making more...

I frequently get asked by folks I know in the for-profit tech sector (where I come from), why we don't focus on making money. The team at Benetech seems very strong, and it seems clear we could go off and find a way to make big money. I agree. But, that's not Benetech. We chose a nonprofit form to do those things we were sure the for-profit world wouldn't do. Or, if they did, they would keep focusing on those "applications with commercial potential." We pretty much exist to adapt technology developed for those "applications with commercial potential" to applications with great social impact and limited commercial potential. When you have two bottom lines, one of them is the deciding factor. When your organization faces a critical choice (and most organizations seem to need to make these choices), it will pick the bottom line that reflects its organizational charter. If serving shareholders is that bottom line, because you're a for-profit, I re...