Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Guest blog by Pavi Mehta, Volunteer Coordinator Open source champion Mozilla.org kicked off seven days of service earlier this month: September 14-21st thousands of people donated over 6000 hours of their time to good causes in their communities as part of Mozilla Service Week . Through one of our engineering volunteers, Aravind Gottipatti, Benetech/Bookshare received an invitation to help them kick-off the week. Betsy Beaumon, Carrie Karnos, Rick Costa and I visited the terrific Mozilla offices in Mountain View last Monday to give the team a big picture view of what Benetech does and present a range of volunteer projects that they could dive into right away. Workstations were set up in their spacious lounge and through the course of the afternoon volunteers swung by to help type in children’s books for our collection (pre-selected books that for various reasons are easier to transcribe than scan). The following Friday a team from Mozilla paid Bookshare a visit and after a brief tour ...

Inside naked light bulbs reveal bare cinder-block walls, stained concrete floors, desks and filing cabinets. Above all there is the musty odor of decaying paper. No, this is not a description of Benetech’s Palo Alto, California headquarters. Rather, this is a hot-off-the-presses Smithsonian Magazine article about our Human Rights Data Analysis Group’s work in Guatamala. HRDAG, as we affectionately call the group, is working with the archive of the now disbanded Guatemalan National Police, which as the Smithsonian puts it, was “implicated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of tens of thousands of people during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.” Check out the whole story here. And don’t forget to look at the photo gallery, which features some great pictures taken by Benetech’s Communications Director Ann Harrison. One photo features Patrick Ball, director of Benetech’s human rights program examining documents from the archive.

It's easy to forget how technology spreads. I just heard about the use of Miradi and the Open Standards in the Axios Delta in Greece. They have just released their management plan (in English) . What a thrill to see our software used to figure out how to conserve an exciting nature area I've only just now learned about! And, we're getting reports from all over the world of Miradi being used in countries like Indonesia and China, among many others. Looking forward to seeing more plans and more stories of conservation in action!

A Guest Beneblog by Viji Dilip, This summer I visited the International Institute of Social Entrepreneurship (IISE) . Situated on the banks of the Vellayani fresh water lake, on the outskirts on Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India , IISE is a testimony to social enterprise at its very best. This is another venture of Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg who founded Braille without Borders in Lhasa, Tibet. IISE is an institute that has been established to train participants (age 18+) who have the right initiative, motivation and potential to establish and run their own social projects. Paul took great pride in showing me around the three acre campus that has been built with eco-friendly materials . He has incorporated rain water harvesting, solar water-heaters, bio glass plants, “Nothing is wasted here, not even human waste” joked Paul. The campus, that feels like a holiday resort and an university at the same time houses the International Institute of Social Entrepreneurs. Sabriye...

The hottest book in publishing is already in Bookshare in high quality digital text. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol launched yesterday to tremendous sales. Although it's digitally available on the Kindle and other ebook platforms, these aren't accessible to our Bookshare members. Thanks to our team to making sure our users have equal access to cultural phenomena like The Lost Symbol!

Last night I was able to meet Vivek Kundra, the new Chief Information Officer of the federal government, at an event organized by Full Circle Fund and the Craigslist Foundation hosted by IBM at their offices on Market Street in San Francisco. For me, it's an amazing change. In the last month, I've been able to meet Obama's CIO, the new CTO, Aneesh Chopra, and the head of the White House Office of Social Innovation, Sonal Shah, all in small group settings where every attendee got to speak. These three are hopefully representative of the technology and innovation agenda of the new administration. They are all coming out to the San Francisco Bay Area, a hotbed of tech and innovation, primarily to listen. But, it's also clear that they have a really clear grasp of many of the issues facing innovation in the federal government, tempered with a healthy dose of reality. In the tech area, Vivek Kundra noted that the annual IT budget of the federal government is $76 billion....