A Slice of the Joy of Being at Benetech

My job is so much fun! I get to spend most of my time talking to people about social good: what we're doing with technology, what our partners are doing and what the many cool people we get to meet are doing along the way. I realize that it's rare that I can share some of these meetings with our team and with the blogosphere, so here are few tidbits just from last week!
  1. The first group was the De Novo Group, co-founded by famed Internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer to take cool, socially beneficial software (often created at UC Berkeley) and bring it to the world. We connected at the recent Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference and decided we should get together. Scott McNeil came to Benetech and we talked about their MetaMouse project (getting multiple mice to work on the same PC, so that kids in low-PC resource places can work together). KoBoToolbox is a toolkit for making it easy to collect survey data on mobile devices (turns out, I later found out we're already proposing to use this to do a survey in Africa). Plus, we discussed much more exciting tech that's in the De Novo pipeline, contributing to areas Benetech is very interested in!
  2. Next, our Palo Alto neighbors D-Rev (for Design Revolution) dropped by in the form of CEO Krista Donaldson. D-Rev wants to create solutions to help the poorest people in the world. We talked about their Jaipur knee project, and a low-cost lighting solution to fight jaundice in newborns. Krista and I had a wide-ranging conversation, the kind that social entrepreneurs tend to have when they get together (like, how to get projects to have impact at scale and where to find the money to launch new projects and scale them).
  3. Then, I heard that one of our partners had just been recognized as the first recipient of the David Kato Vision & Voice Award, which honors the murdered Ugandan LGBT activist. Jamaican lawyer and activist Maurice Tomlinson of J-FLAG will be recognized next month. We've been honored to support J-FLAG in their work, and we believe that our work with J-FLAG has helped lead to our new major project helping LGBT groups in Uganda and other African countries.

And that was on top of the normal hubbub at Benetech: meeting on existing and new projects, talking to donors and supporters, and even having our quarterly board meeting (went really well) and our annual holiday party (hope to provide more soon on the holiday party, we did something really cool with another social enterprise).

As we look forward to 2012, it's easy for us to be optimistic when we see the quality of the work of our partners, and see other technical people working to see technology fully serve all of humanity!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Image
I believe in the power of books to change the world. That is not a particularly radical belief among librarians, but I hope to make you believe even more in the power of books. Literacy and access to knowledge underpins just about every social good, from education, to economic development, to health, to women’s empowerment, democracy and respect for human rights. Today, we are poised at a moment in time where we can transcend the limitations of past book technologies and bring the power of books to all humans. To bring the power of books to everybody on this planet, we must make books truly accessible. Love of the print book. It made me who I am. I’m a big fan of the printed book and always have been. However, as a technology, printed books come with serious challenges for some communities (like blind people) that technology can unlock. Consider the issues with printed books. First, they are place-based. In order to read a printed book, you must have physical access to it.  W
Read more

10X: CEO’s Update: Spring 2014

Image
10X: ten times the impact. That’s what’s been on my mind lately. How can our existing successful programs reach ten times more people? How can we use technology in a new way to improve people’s lives that is an order of magnitude better? Can we help stimulate the creation of far more technology-for-good ventures? The Benetech team has already accomplished great things for our users, but there is so much more we can do. Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice. But what about everybody else? While it’s not a panacea, technology has been the engine of so many improvements in society. The time has never been better to think 10X bigger! I have disruptive approaches to social innovation in mind, with an increasingly connected society where the cost of prototyping and deploying new products is extremely low, and where innovation is no longer the sole purview of well-funded for-profit corporations. We del
Read more

On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates

Image
Guest Beneblog by  Betsy Beaumon, VP and General Manager, Benetech’s Global Literacy Program. Betsy Beaumon I recently had the honor to speak at the first-ever Braille Summit , hosted on June 19-21, 2013 by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Perkins School for the Blind. With the goal of promoting braille literacy, this landmark meeting brought together braille experts from around the world to Perkins’ campus in Watertown, Massachusetts. My biggest takeaway from the summit: the time could not be more urgent, and more hopeful, for the future of braille and the prospects of those who need it. That’s why braille is an important focus for us in Benetech’s Global Literacy Program — we know that we must keep braille relevant and make it more available. One of the biggest reasons is that among people who are blind, braille literacy has been linked with higher education levels, higher likelihood of employment and higher income. According
Read more