Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Guatemalan National Police Archive Goes Online

2012-01-25T14:40:00.000-08:00

Guest Beneblog by Ann Harrison

In 2006, the Benetech Human Rights Program was asked to participate in one of the most important human rights data projects in the world. The Guatemalan government human rights ombudsman invited the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to analyze the contents of the estimated 80 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive or the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). HRDAG designed a process to randomly sample the Archive and the archivists began using Benetech’s Martus software to organize and secure information generated from the samples. Just last month, the University of Texas at Austin made a large portion of the Archive available to the public unveiling a digital repository that contains 12 million of these critical records. This repository is an important step forward for the people of Guatemala and those seeking information about human rights abuses that occurred during the country’s 36 years of armed internal conflict.

The Guatemalan government and the police long denied the existence of these records - particularly during investigations by truth commissions organized by the United Nations and the Catholic Church during the final years of the conflict. Discovered by chance in 2005, the Archive has revealed a trove of documents dating from 1882 to 1997 including millions of arrest warrants, surveillance reports, identification documents, interrogation records, snapshots of detainees and informants, and unidentified bodies, fingerprint files, transcripts of radio communications, and ledgers of names and photographs. These records shed light on the complicity of police and other security forces during the years of violence that killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans. The Archive has also provided valuable information corroborating findings that involve the U.S. in medical experimentation on Guatemalan citizens as part of syphilis research in the 1940s.

According to Archive Deputy Director Alberto Fuentes, the Archive contains key information about crimes and violent acts, as well as records of social control and surveillance, especially of opposition politicians. Fuentes says archivists have found more than 900,000 personal dossiers containing names, photographs and fingerprints of individuals, as well as notes about their political activities. Documents from the Guatemala City-based Archive have already provided critical information in the prosecution of former members of Guatemalan security forces accused of human rights abuses. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán, based on analysis of Archive documents, provided key evidence in the conviction of two former Guatemalan National Police officers accused of disappearing and murdering Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando García.

Dr. Patrick Ball, Chief Scientist and Vice President of Benetech’s Human Rights Program, presented research data from six years of Archive analysis during a conference at the University of Texas where the digital repository was unveiled. You can read about Benetech’s findings from the Archive here and here. In addition to producing findings used to convict former police officers, the Archive has produced documents that have provided evidence for the arrest and prosecution of senior officials.

Family members of those who disappeared during the years of violence are also using the Archive to help locate their loved ones. José Suasnabar, Assistant Director of the non-governmental Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), told the Inter Press Service (IPS) that investigators have found records in the Archive that will help them identify bodies buried in unmarked graves. The creators of the repository said in a statement that the online records, “will bring together previously disparate experiences of personal memory and trauma, and promote public dialogue.”

“Documents about our family members have been found, and it is helping bring the cases to trial,” Aura Elena Farfán of the Guatemalan Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared (FAMDEGUA), told the IPS. "Our concern now is that everyone who in one way or another has come under scrutiny for the repression during the war wants the archive to disappear.”

Documents in the Archive continue to be digitized by a committed team of archivists and added to the digital repository to help secure historical memory, legal and scholarly use. Benetech is proud to support this project and our ongoing work with the Archive to analyze the contents of the records. According to the organizers of the University of Texas conference, the repository will provide “researchers, human rights activists, and prosecutors around the world an archive that has already begun to help rewrite the history of state repression in Guatemala.”

You can read more about the Guatemalan National Police Archive digital repository here.

Why We're Blacking Out Sites: PIPA and SOPA

2012-01-18T07:31:00.000-08:00

In November, I wrote a blog post entitled: Why I’m Scared of the SOPA bill. Part of my objective was to show the unintended consequences of Internet censorship bills like SOPA and PIPA (SOPA's Senate buddy bill), responding to alerts from organizations I trust like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Copyright Alliance had the courtesy of engaging with multiple comments in favor of the proposed bills, but they failed to directly address (either a deliberate omission or because it was a robot) my major concerns about two of our main technology programs: the Bookshare online library (largest in the world for people with print disabilities) and our Human Rights program.

Today, we're joining what is probably the largest online protest in history, by blacking out significant portions of the Benetech website, as well as our Martus and HRDAG human rights websites. We're not alone: far larger sites like Wikipedia and Google and hundreds of others (if not thousands).

Copyright hawks like Rupert Murdoch and the MPAA have attacked this movement as being for piracy, against jobs, and dangerous. But, we're not for piracy. Like almost all libraries, we're scrupulous in following the law, because we're serving incredibly important communities. But, badly crafted bills like SOPA and PIPA do far more collateral damage to freedom and economic wellbeing than they do good for the putative beneficiaries.

Make no mistake, we are for the Internet, we are for jobs, we are for legal access to content, and we are for human rights and freedom of speech. And we're part of a movement that believes passionately that the Internet is a treasure: a force for equality and economic growth.

Don't Break the Internet! And, let's follow up Blackout Day with a campaign to pass laws that protect this critically important resource!

Engineers Without Borders Canada

2012-01-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

I greatly enjoy talking to students, and I am now in Ottawa, Canada, just having spoken to an incredible group of students, Engineers Without Borders Canada. Now, I had heard of EWB before, but I hadn't grasped how large, sophisticated and ambitious an organization this is!

I'm at the annual Canadian EWB conference (each of the EWB country groups is independent of the other), and there are hundreds and hundreds of students here. Mainly engineering students, but as EWB Canada has grown and matured, they've increased the size of their umbrella and welcome non-engineering students. Oh, and at least half of the engineering students here are women. Hint to the profession: if you link engineering to helping people rather than gadgets, women seem to be more interested!

Dr. Pamela Hartigan, head of the Skoll Centre at Oxford University's Said Business School, noted in her keynote that EWB was the largest single source of Skoll Scholars at Oxford. That made me realize how important this channel of engineers doing social good was to the social entrepreneurship movement. As someone who has both recommended a Skoll Scholar (Jesse Fahnestock of our Bookshare team was in the first class of Skoll Scholars) and hired a fabulous MBA from Jesse's class: Barbara Morrison, who led our business development team for years, I can see how important this is!

I gave two talks here: one on failure, and one on engineering for social good, Benetech style. The first was on our Landmine Detector Project and why we think it failed. Right after my session, EWB released its own report on how it had failed in numerous project. I think it's incredibly important for the social sector to acknowledge and learn from failures. Bravo to EWB for prominently featuring its Failure Reports.

My second session spent a lot of time on the Benetech process for choosing projects, which Aaron Firestone, our current head of business development, spent a lot of time updating last year and had our board approve last month. We'll be putting it up on our website in the next couple of months. What was exciting was that EWB Canada had just put up their version of project development, which they call Intelligent Development. And, it's very similar to our approach. Like Benetech, EWB started with a technology-centric focus and moved to realizing that system change and improving the lives of real people is the true way to do good with technology. I'd say the main difference is that as a software-focused organization, Benetech thinks mostly about products, and then does projects utilizing our products. EWB, as a more hardware focused organization, tends to do projects, and so their focus on exit options by turning over projects to local partners is even more intense than ours.

As an engineer who has been working on social good for over twenty years, and felt pretty lonely the first ten or so, it's exciting to run into an organization that has many engineers in the field (in Africa), and tens of thousands of members around Canada! I'm leaving Ottawa today with optimism for the future, based on the incredible young people I met here!

A Tale of Two Angels

2011-12-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

When I first started pursuing the idea that technology can be harnessed to the cause of social good, it was pretty far out. Now, more than twenty years later, what has become known as social entrepreneurship is a hot global movement that is transforming the ways in which we approach the world’s most pressing problems and in which society organizes itself to solve them. Social entrepreneurship has its own conferences, publications, academic programs and awards. We celebrate the notion that nothing is as powerful as a great idea when put in the hands of a bold entrepreneur, and the lionization of entrepreneurs is a trend.

Let’s remember, though, that behind the entrepreneurs are equally daring angel investors: those who bet on these men and women when they have nothing to show but passion and excitement, and who empower them to realize their vision. After all, any great idea needs a vote of confidence, great advice and an infusion of cash to have a large-scale impact!

Even today, it’s not an easy task to find investors who are willing to take a chance on socially responsible ventures that prioritize social good over profitability. You can imagine how difficult it was back in 1982, when I founded Calera Recognition Systems (originally named the Palantir Corporation). My first successful tech company created technologies that could read just about any book or document. My very first angel investor who helped us get Calera off the ground was Sheldon Breiner. Sheldon is an amazing guy: a Silicon Valley serial inventor and entrepreneur who’s known as the Indiana Jones of geophysics. He’s an expert in magnetometers for natural resources and defense applications, and the inventor of the security walk-through metal detector and many other cool devices. Sheldon invested his own money in the newly born Calera and made important connections to key figures. Sheldon saying “I’ll invest in you” was the catalyst that led to Calera's first round of venture capital. Today, Calera is part of Nuance, the leading company in its field.

Sheldon was someone who I stayed in touch with even after leaving Calera to start a nonprofit social enterprise to make the Arkenstone reading machines for the blind (Arkenstone was the original name of Benetech). At a crucial turning point in Benetech’s history, I ran into Sheldon and outlined my dreams of doing more. I remember the event well: it was a rare speaking engagement by Bill Gates in 1999 when Gates was starting to shift into philanthropy in a big way.

Sheldon’s quick-shot reaction was, “you need to meet my friend, Robert.” And so, my very first for-profit angel introduced me to my first nonprofit angel! Robert Levenson had a tremendous impact on shaping the incredible organization we now know as Benetech.

At the time, I was in the process of selling the Arkenstone product line to a for-profit. I was eager to repeat the experience under our new name of Benetech. I thought if I was lucky, I could use the money from the sale of the Arkenstone assets to start a second successful social enterprise.

Robert, however, changed my mind about what the new nonprofit should be like. His first comment after hearing the Arkenstone story and my dreams to start another Arkenstone-style enterprise was that if I did so, he’d consider that a failure. I was flabbergasted. But Robert went on to explain that he felt that the best use of my efforts was to drive the creation of five or ten new enterprises at Benetech, not just a second one. And, he made the case that I should work to help build the field of social enterprise, and see if I could help build a movement that would lead to the creation of hundreds of technology social enterprises! He argued that I could have a bigger impact on the world by mentoring new social entrepreneurs, finding resources for them and helping them avoid the pitfalls I had experienced. Robert felt that, by aiming high, I would help build a movement of technologists who were more engaged in meeting humanity’s critical needs.
It was a breathtaking moment for me, to have a first-time meeting go in this completely unanticipated direction. What was stunning was being told that I lacked ambition, something I had never felt short of in the past! But, Robert was right. If I really wanted to make more social impact, I had to take on a different role. I’d have to become more like an angel like Robert and Sheldon.

But, Robert wasn’t just about giving me advice. He was a big believer in finding the precise intervention that would have the maximum impact. Like many angels, Robert didn’t have the most money to donate to us, but he was sure he could find a way to utilize leverage to help us. He connected me with two fabulous senior fundraising consultants, who mentored me at Robert’s expense for more than a year on how to become a better fundraiser for social innovation. He introduced me to leaders in the social innovation space, expanding my network and my understanding of the opportunities ahead. As a result of Robert’s help, one of the very first donors I met was Sally Osberg, who was just starting as the head of Jeff Skoll’s foundation (Jeff was the first CEO of eBay, and also the founder of Participant Media, the people behind incredible movies like Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth and The Help, among dozens more). Sally and Jeff have been the largest and longest term supporters of Benetech since that early meeting.

Robert went further and personally pitched Benetech to a very wealthy donor. At my first meeting with this donor and Robert, Benetech received an incredible unrestricted one million dollar gift. That funding, along with backing from Skoll Foundation and the Omidyar Network, was the rocket fuel for what Benetech has become today. Benetech was no longer just what I was going to do next, but a new phase in the search for innovative ways to apply maximum leverage to solving pressing problems on a scale well beyond a single project.

So here’s to Sheldon, Robert and all the other angels out there. You, who much like the entrepreneurs whom you support, act as society’s change agents. Thank you for unleashing resources where others see only problems. Thank you for seizing opportunities, which others miss, enabling new approaches and creating social value. And thank you for believing in crazy entrepreneurs, even those with little or no track record. Let’s hope that, as the social entrepreneurship movement continues to build, even more socially responsible angel groups and venture funds will arise and with them more opportunities for social enterprises to change the world for the better!

A Slice of the Joy of Being at Benetech

2011-12-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

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!

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!
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).
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!

International Human Rights Day 2011

2011-12-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today, December 10th, the international community is observing Human Rights Day to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since its adoption at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Declaration has become a universal standard for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. On International Human Rights Day, we pay tribute to all human rights defenders, celebrate the recent victories of the human rights community, and recognize the challenges that still lie ahead in the global struggle to advance justice, accountability and an end to impunity.

2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first elections, or the encouraging signs of progress in Burma.

The Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) is hard at work to ensure that technology and science best meet the needs of human rights defenders in these critical times. This past year, our HRP team helped the human rights movement achieve great things. Here’s a sample of our accomplishments:

Martus, our secure, open-source information management software for human rights defenders continued to empower many human rights groups worldwide to secure thousands of stories of human rights violations and to use this information strategically to advance their causes. Our new and long-term Martus partners crossed a milestone and backed up to our public servers over 200,000 bulletins, each of which captures crucial, sensitive information about incidents from a victim’s story or from a field investigation.
Our Martus team trained two new partners focused on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people: Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, or J-FLAG and AIDS-Free World. Both organizations work in the Caribbean, where sexual minorities face widespread violence, bigotry and marginalization. In the case of J-FLAG, Martus enables the organization to protect the identity of victims of abuse who come forward to tell their stories, to secure the information from their interviews, to report on the types of crimes documented, and to aggregate evidence for future court proceedings. Our support of groups advancing LGBTI rights is opening up new opportunities for helping many more such groups around the world.
HRP members produced scientifically sound analysis that is advancing the process of legal justice in Guatemala. In a recent blog post, I described how HRP statistician Daniel Guzmán’s expert testimony in a breakthrough legal case against two former police officers helped score a remarkable victory in the fight to end impunity in Guatemala. I invite you to read Daniel’s first-person account of his expert testimony as published in the statistical magazine Chance. The testimony prompted further investigation that led to the arrest of three former senior officials. I’m proud to report here that, at the request of the Attorney General of Guatemala, our team has prepared statistical analysis to inform the prosecutions of these high-profile officials. We’re honored to support the process towards justice and accountability at this critical time in Guatemala’s history.
Our team members are creating an “accountability toolkit” – a set of innovative techniques for identifying patterns of responsibility for grave human rights crimes. To that end, we combine statistical analysis of patterns of violence with information about military and police hierarchy, communication flow and deployment patterns. The combined analysis supports scientific arguments about responsibility for mass atrocities – arguments that are successful in court cases.
Through projects that integrated statistical analyses into multidisciplinary human rights work, we engaged in the public debate about human rights violations in Colombia. First, in partnership with Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista, we assessed a methodology for studying conflict-related sexual violence in the country. We identified important opportunities for developing a substantive, quantitative-based sexual violence research agenda. This analysis is now helping to reframe how sexual violence is studied and understood by groups in Colombia and by the United Nations. Second, we strengthened the public debate about the free trade agreements that Colombia negotiates with the U.S. and the European Union. Colombia’s record of violence against trade union members has been an obstacle to finalizing the agreements. HRP’s calculated estimates of trade union member homicides – part of our work with the Colombian Commission of Jurists – brought clarity to this intense debate.
We advanced human rights advocacy and the community more broadly by placing human rights at the forefront of academic research and by educating wide audiences about statistical best practices in the analysis of violence. HRP team members presented papers at academic conferences, published articles in academic journals, and offered many public talks. All HRP’s publications are available online.

Benetech's Human Rights Program also received this year great recognition by the media and by experts in the field of human rights. In my Fall 2011 President’s Update, I mentioned PBS NewsHour’s two stories, and complete press coverage of our work is listed on our website.

In addition, our work is praised in a report and recommendation for donors entitled “Human Rights and International Justice: Challenges and Opportunities at an Inflection Point,” which was commissioned by The Atlantic Philanthropies. Based on extensive conversations with experts in the human rights and international justice field, the authors – Jonathan Fanton (former President of the MacArthur Foundation and of New School University) and Zachary Katznelson – provide an overview of the state of the field along with concrete recommendations that aim to stimulate more philanthropic investment in it. Among their recommendations is that NGOs be trained to collect, analyze and use data effectively, since the impact of their advocacy depends on establishing credibility through good data. They state: “An investment in Benetech to allow it to train leading NGOs in how to gather, verify, and use data and evidence could significantly raise the quality of information.” In another section they add: “[Benetech’s work in] human rights data collection and analysis … should grow at least tenfold.” We’re deeply grateful for this strong support of our work.

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. In that regard, we recently got terrific news about our Martus project. First, last June, the HRP received a generous multi-year grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to develop the next generation of Martus. The new Martus will harness today’s emerging technologies in order to ensure that human rights organizations, journalists and other social justice actors achieve more with the invaluable stories that they collect. It will make data visualization and comprehension, as well as information collection and sharing much easier by integrating mobile applications, cloud hosting and innovative tools while maintaining the highest level of security. We’re so excited to embark upon this new project!

Moreover, in September, our Martus project received a 2-year grant from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to train partner African human rights organizations that gather information about violations against LGBTI people. The award will enable us to increase the capacity of local human rights organizations in Uganda and key Southern African countries to sustain a long-term monitoring and documentation effort. We’re delighted about the opportunity to advance the strategic goals of local NGOs working to end discrimination against LGBTI people.

The year 2011 has shown in many ways that the arc of history is bending toward justice. But the road toward justice is long and nothing is inevitable. Many challenges to global respect of human rights still lie ahead, and many more groups around the world need our help. In 2012, we will also continue to carry out multiple, high-stakes projects in which we provide scientific assistance with statistical analysis of violence. True to our organizational values, our team is working hard to ensure that the upcoming projects we undertake in the service of the human rights community are the right ones to do and that we do them right.

There are a lot of things that – for privacy and security reasons – we can’t reveal about our future projects. But we can promise that we’re going to continue to develop innovative technology and science solutions to defend human rights defenders, promote legal justice by strengthening court cases, and advance post-revolutionary accountability. We invite you to visit the HRP’s websites (Martus; HRDAG) for updates about our work, and to join us in celebrating global human rights.

Benetech: President's Update

2011-12-08T05:40:00.000-08:00

President’s Update
Fall 2011

Don’t be surprised, but we’re picking up the pace of change at Benetech! The world’s problems are many, and we keep seeing opportunities for technologists to address those problems effectively. Our team has been thinking hard about scaling positive social impact of technology work.

I want to unveil several of these new initiatives, as well as sneaking in some of the incredible things happening in our core programs in literacy and human rights.

Highlights of this Letter:

SocialCoding4Good
CityOptions
Read2Go and Route 66 Literacy
Selected Program Updates

Human rights: Legal victory in Guatemala, PBS NewsHour stories
Literacy: Major milestones for Bookshare at home and abroad

SocialCoding4Good
Just funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, our SocialCoding4Good initiative will kick off later this year. 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. 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. We believe that having more minds working simultaneously on a problem increases the odds of solving that problem well and quickly. So, we’re creating a new place where techies can find social tech applications that resonate with their personal passion for change!

CityOptions
The best idea we received last year for a new project is getting underway! CityOptions is an environmental initiative to help local governments—particularly small and mid-sized ones—plan and execute effective sustainability initiatives. Taking into account each city’s unique situation, constraints and opportunities, this online open source software will zero in on the top strategies for meeting that city’s objectives for cost reduction, energy efficiency or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We also want to enable effective information sharing among agencies about what does and doesn’t work. Our goal is to revolutionize the effectiveness of local governments in responding to climate change and other environmental impacts.

Read2Go
Bookshare goes mobile! The number one request from our users was for an iPad/iPhone app that would enable them to easily read on the go. With our Read2Go app, Bookshare members can now search, download and read Bookshare books and periodicals on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices. We’re thrilled that students and other readers who have disabilities that keep them from reading standard print can now read the same books as their peers, using the same devices.

Route 66
Route 66, our online platform for teaching reading, has officially launched thanks to support from the Peery Foundation. Route 66 is software that provides teachers (and non-teachers!) with the tools to teach reading to adolescent and adult beginning readers, such as those with developmental disabilities. The key here is providing materials that are age, interest and ability appropriate. Route 66 pairs this reading content with teaching tools and learning exercises, effectively empowering any literate person to become an early reading instructor. Dr. Karen Erickson, one of the nation's leading experts in literacy for people with disabilities, invented the original concept for Route 66 and collaborated closely with us on the instructional approach and content. Being able to read is crucial for life success and independence, and we’re hoping to empower thousands of people to become readers as teenagers and young adults.

Program Updates

Human Rights Program - Legal Victory in Guatemala
In my last Update, I wrote about our testimony in Guatemala at the trial of two policemen, charged with the disappearance of a prominent union leader. Now I can report that the two policemen were convicted and sentenced to forty years each for the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García. HRP’s statistical analysis of evidence from the Guatemalan National Police Archives, which contains some 80 million documents, has helped to establish forced disappearance as a crime in Guatemala. This is a huge legal victory! After decades of human rights work to achieve justice for the victims and families who suffered forced disappearances, this recent ruling opens an opportunity for the Guatemalan court system to address the massive human rights crimes of the armed internal conflict.

PBS NewsHour Stories
In March, PBS NewsHour published two stories about Benetech and the HRP. A lengthy broadcast segment, “To Combat Human Rights Abuses, California Company Looks to Computer Code,” noted that Benetech's Martus software is used to secure sensitive human rights data such as the type of information about abuses that have recently been documented in the Middle East. PBS’ online story, “The Panic Button: High-Tech Protection for Human Rights Investigators,” explained that Martus includes a “panic button” feature that allows users in threatening situations to delete all data and even the program itself with one keystroke.

Literacy - Major Milestones at Home and Abroad
Bookshare had promised to serve 100,000 students over five years in our major contract with the Department of Education to provide all students with print disabilities in the U.S. with the books they need for educational success. We passed this milestone in less than 3.5 years, and continue to expand rapidly. Our members are now downloading accessible books at a rate of more than one million books per year! Bookshare now has over 150,000 members and more than 125,000 books. It is the world’s largest online accessible library, adding books at nearly four times the rate of the next most prolific U.S. library that serves people with print disabilities (on less than one-sixth the budget)!

Internationally, Bookshare is operating in twenty-eight countries that span the globe and offering content in Hindi and Tamil, Spanish, French and German. Through a funded partnership with the Mada Center in Qatar, in 2011 we will pilot Arabic language capability and content, enabling Bookshare to start serving readers throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

Conclusion

With strong values and a commitment to making revolutionary social change through technology, Benetech is just getting started! Not only do we want to do more at scale, we want all other socially minded technologists to find their passion and make good things happen. I hope you’ll join us in growing this movement, and seeing that technology fully serves all of humanity!

Leveraging Impact through Technology (LIT)

2011-12-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

The annual observance of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) is today, December 3rd. 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. People with disabilities make up an estimated 15% of the world’s population of 7 billion, and they remain largely marginalized and affected by discrimination and unemployment, among other significant difficulties. The theme of IDPD 2011 is “Together for a better world for all: Including persons with disabilities in development.” This year, for the first time, IDPD is commemorated with supporting sub-themes (see the full list here), to draw attention to key issues that come into play in the intersection of disability and development processes. One of these sub-themes is “Accessibility: removing barriers and promoting disability-inclusive development.”

Of course, accessibility is right up Benetech’s alley and the focus of our Literacy program. In my Fall 2011 President's Update, I mentioned some of our incredible recent achievements in this core program, including the amazing milestones of our Bookshare library. Bookshare is dramatically exceeding its five-year collection and member targets at the close of the fourth year of our Bookshare for Education (B4E) project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). Today I’m delighted to share the exciting news about the new award we just received from OSEP to build upon Bookshare’s success and significantly improve access for students with disabilities.

This last September, Benetech won a 3 million dollar award over one year from OSEP for a project we call Leveraging Impact through Technology, or, very appropriately, LIT. In partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the LIT project will dramatically enhance the availability and quality of accessible educational material for students with print disabilities at all levels of education. Through the LIT project, we’re adding many new innovations to the groundwork laid by the B4E project, with a focus on three core areas: content, tools, and utilization. Here’s a glimpse at what we’re delivering:

Open-content, publicly available and freely shared image descriptions and reusable graphical models to improve accessibility of NIMAC textbooks and Common Core content (this is so cool, I'm going to write another blog just on this aspect: look for the Triple Play blog!)
Exciting new tools, including a free, open source Android ebook reader and a free web-based ebook reader along with an accessible bookshelf in “the cloud.” These will enable educators to easily assign accessible books to students, and allow students to access these materials – available in mp3 and DAISY audio – on multiple devices of their choosing, whether at home, on the move, or at school.
Free professional development for school districts across the country in order to increase utilization of Bookshare and serve as many students as possible.

Our innovative approach has revolutionized the traditional library for people with print disabilities. Bookshare is currently serving 150,000 (and counting) students with a collection – the world’s largest – that tops 126,000 accessible books, including NIMAC textbooks, teacher recommended reading, reference materials, periodicals and best-selling titles. Thousands of ebooks pour into the library from over 168 publishers and textbook requests are fulfilled every month. This innovative approach is now opening up completely new horizons.

One of the reasons why the LIT project is so exciting and cool is that it enables us to pursue some of these new directions, using tech innovation to scale up efforts to ensure equal access to quality education by students with disabilities for years to come. In the U.S., Bookshare is allowed to serve only students with a legally qualifying print disability per the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act. Yet those who qualify represent but a small fraction of the demographics that can benefit from accessible books. With the LIT project – especially with its open-content aspects and new tools – we’re setting our sights on changing the lives of many more students. We’re honored and proud to embark upon this new project!

Why I’m Scared of the SOPA bill

2011-11-28T05:36:00.000-08:00

Benetech, is a leading nonprofit organization based in Silicon Valley. We write software for people with disabilities as well as human rights and environmental groups. We’re against piracy, and have made commitments to authors and publishers to encourage compliance with copyright law.

So, we shouldn’t have anything to fear from a bill entitled “Stop Online Piracy Act,” right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

We’re getting very worried that our organization and the people we serve: people with print disabilities (i.e., people who are blind or severely dyslexic), and human rights groups will be collateral damage in Hollywood’s attempt to break the Internet in their latest effort to squash “piracy.” And, if we’re worried, a lot of other good organizations should start getting worried! Let me give two specific examples that came up in my first conversation with a lawyer about the proposed bill:

1. Stopping fund raising and subscription revenue for Bookshare, the largest online library for people who have print disabilities.

Bookshare is an online library for people who can’t read standard print books. We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. We serve over 150,000 students with disabilities alone with free online services funded by the Department of Education (however, nothing contained in this post has anything to do with our funders). We also have thousands of adults with disabilities that pay a $50 a year subscription to be able to download all the books and newspapers they can read. Ironically, many of these users might buy commercial ebooks, but the anti-piracy technology built into many ebook systems are not compatible with the technology these users employ to get the books in Braille or synthetic speech.

Bookshare is legal in the United States because our copyright law includes an exception that allows nonprofit organizations like Benetech to make accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities without requesting permission or paying a royalty.

We frequently get emails or letters from authors, agents or publishers who don’t know much about people with disabilities or about Section 121 of the copyright law, calling us pirates and asking us to cease and desist from making their books available on the Internet. Often, these communications come in the form of what’s called a DMCA or take-down notice. Now, we have a nice little letter thanking them, explaining that we only help people with bona fide disabilities, that it’s legal, that we’ve worked with the big publishing associations and with authors groups, and wouldn’t they like to help us in the future by adding more of their books voluntarily to our collection. Most of the time, that works great, and we end up making a new friend after they dig a little and find out that we are closer to Florence Nightingale than the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Sometimes, we have to spend time talking a newbie lawyer down from high dudgeon and explaining that there really are such things as exceptions and limitations in copyright, and do they really want to have their client be the first author to attack the rights of blind people to be able to get Braille? And then they go away. Because that’s a lawsuit they are unlikely to win, and it would be a professional error to waste their client’s money attacking a library doing legal things.

However, SOPA apparently has shoot first, ask questions later provisions. If any single publisher or author of any one of the more than 130,000 accessible books in our library gets antsy, they can send a notice to VISA and MasterCard and say, stop money from going to Benetech and Bookshare. No more donations to our charity. No more subscriptions from individual adults with disabilities.

No need to send us a letter. Or file a DMCA notice. Or do any real research. Just send out a bunch of notices and get all those pirates! Except, we’re not pirates. But, now the burden of proof has shifted to us: we’re presumed guilty, and we have to spent time and money defending ourselves. Sounds kind of un-American, doesn’t it?

Now, apparently, we can file a counter-notice. But, my guess is that the credit card guys are going to play it safe and stay away from turning “pirates” back on, and we’d end up in court arguing to be able to get our ability to receive funds for our socially beneficial work, not only to help people with disabilities but also our work to help environmental and human rights groups.

Yet another example of bills written to catch criminals, that do very little to stop them, but end up screwing up law-abiding organizations.

2. Endangering Human Rights Activists.

Benetech is one of the largest developers of software for human rights activists around the world. We develop free and open source software to help groups capture the stories of human rights abuse, and store and back them up securely in another country. Wonderful stuff. We work all over the world, and our Martus software has been translated into Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Khmer and other languages.

The U.S. Department of State just funded us to help LGBT groups in Uganda securely capture documentation of abuses against those communities (again, our funders are not responsible for this post). We work in North Africa Latin America, Asia: most of the places where large scale human rights abuses are going on. And, in many of these places, we’re helping the activists avoid censorship and surveillance by the government. It’s also crucially important to be able to assure the confidentiality of witnesses and victims both to protect their privacy (i.e., victims of sexual violence) and their safety (do you want the police to know that you have testified to an illegal killing by the police?).

So, another example of potential collateral damage from SOPA. The problem is that we provide technology that allows for security, privacy and circumvention. We do it for human rights groups. But, when asked if we know whether or not there are “pirated” copyrighted materials, we can’t say. Because, if we make software that promises to keep your life or death sensitive information secret to the best of our abilities, we won’t build a back door in for Syria, or China, or the U.S. government or even (heavens!) Hollywood.

Apparently, one of the provisions of SOPA is that technology and servers and websites that can be used for evading controls on piracy can be shut down by the Attorney General. Unfortunately, safeguarding human rights information can’t be distinguished from piracy, if the contents are encrypted. So, our software, and the TOR network servers we and others operate, and other similar technologies, can get shut down in the name of protecting Hollywood.

Let's Not Do This Stupid Thing, and Avoid Breaking the Internet

In conclusion, I can’t imagine that breaking the Internet, making charities waste money fighting thoughtless and careless allegations, and making it easier for repressive governments to suppress human rights groups, was what was intended when this bill was drafted. Our concerns are just one set out of many. Engineers have described this bill as “breaking the Internet,” because complying with it requires major (and not good) changes in how the Internet works today. Most tech companies think this is the most counter-productive job and innovation killing bill they've seen in years. And, tons of human rights groups have protested against the U.S. starting to act more like China than the home of the free. The costs and impacts far outweigh any (unlikely) benefit Hollywood would receive. Let’s not do this as a country.

Background information:

Electronic Frontier Foundation has great information on SOPA and related bills, including this one: SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet. If you're so moved, here's where EFF points you to taking action by contacting your elected representatives: Take Action | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Amnesty International at 50

2011-11-14T16:42:00.000-08:00

I’m thinking a great deal these days about human rights and about doing more for the field. Today, I gave a presentation on human rights in DC, with a focus on our work with truth commissions. I recently spoke at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, where I talked about technology for human rights defenders. Our human rights team is expanding and taking on new and exciting challenges. It makes me think about one of the giants of our field.

Earlier this year, I spoke at the 50th Anniversary Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International (AI). I stuck around for the main closing meeting, where the history and future of AI was presented. I was amazed to learn about the ways in which AI has transformed itself over the first half century of its existence, as one of the preeminent human rights group of our time.

AI was founded in 1961 on the inspiration of British lawyer Peter Benenson, whose article “The Forgotten Prisoners” launched the first Prisoners of Conscience campaign, which ignited overwhelming global support and marked the birth of AI. The newly formed organization initially based its demands on select parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on the Prisoners of Conscience campaign. In particular, it focused on freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of opinion and expression, humane treatment of prisoners and the right to a fair trial. This set of principles was incorporated in AI’s mandate: the set of rules establishing the organization's goals and action parameters, or what it and its local groups can and cannot do.

Over the years, AI has altered and expanded its mandate to address new human rights issues and to ease the creative tension between the demands of its grassroots membership and its organizational policy. In fact, the adopted changes are at the heart of the organization’s identity and suggest that every generation reinvents AI. In the 1970s, AI widened its mandate to cover work against torture, extra-judicial killings and disappearances. Many other human rights and social issues were added in the following decades: ending the death penalty, advancing women’s and children’s rights, holding the rights of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, and protecting LGBT rights. In 2001, its 40th anniversary year, AI expanded its mandate considerably to incorporate economic, social and cultural rights, as well as the body of international law governing armed conflict, thus committing itself to advance all human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

At times, the changes in AI’s charter and organizational policies involved controversial decisions, arousing both internal and external debates: should people who use or advocate the use of force in opposing oppressive regimes be recognized as Prisoners of Conscience? What about people imprisoned solely due to their sexual orientation? Is it okay to allow AI members to not belong to a local group? Even more broadly: can AI be transformed rapidly enough to meet the many new challenges to human rights? Can it make the changes that are required while remaining true to all it has stood for in the past?

As an organization that monitors the changing conditions of human rights, AI – like other human rights organizations – undoubtedly must also change. And, clearly, the changes are a source not only of debate, but also of innovation.

At the 50th Anniversary Annual General Meeting, AI’s Secretary General, Salil Shetty, linked the expansion of the mandate with AI’s evolution and with its future directions. He pointed to four disturbing paradoxes affecting human rights at present that AI needs to address: massive increase in both wealth and inequality; tremendous reduction of war in tandem with a rise of global insecurity; huge influence of media and new technology contrasted with low accountability and justice; and increase of democracies coupled with distrust of leadership.

Mr. Shetty described AI’s need to explore in greater depth the conditions underlying human rights problems and to implement proactive, “upstream” strategies for their resolution, in addition to the more reactive approaches reflected in the organization’s established methods. In the coming years, he said, AI must therefore enlarge its footprint in developing countries and address its members’ concerns with poverty, international economic injustices and lack of corporate accountability as major sources of human rights violations. I especially heard strong interest in building the Amnesty movement in Latin America and Asia.

In fact, some of these new directions are already being implemented: as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, AI is running throughout 2011 global actions with a focus on reproductive rights, international justice and stopping corporate abuse. It will be exciting to observe how AI continues to transform itself in the future as the challenges to human rights evolve.

As our human rights team grows and expands its impact, and we launch a new project to help LGBT groups, I have found myself thinking about AI’s evolution and what lessons it has to teach us. How can we remain true to our commitment to the truth, seeing technology and science better defend the defenders of human rights, and advancing global respect for human rights?

One very long weekend in New York City for Megan Price

2011-11-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

Guest Beneblog by Megan Price

New York City has many attractions – people often visit Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, among many other sights. Me? I go to New York City to spend the weekend staring at my computer screen.

Data Without Border’s kickoff Data Dive is what tempted me across the country, and after a much longer than expected day of travel I found myself surrounded by fellow nerds (data scientists, as this particular group prefers to be called). The group included statisticians, epidemiologists, computer scientists, engineers, political scientists, journalists, and ‘data wranglers.’ We were all there thanks to the efforts of Drew Conway, Jake Porway, and Craig Barowsky (Data without Borders’s founders) who had the crazy idea of bringing together well-intentioned data analysts and non-profits with data in need of analysis.

This particular weekend we divided into teams and tackled projects from the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), MiX Market, and UN Global Pulse. I joined the NYCLU team, where we worked on data collected by the New York Police Department about their “stop and frisk” practices. “Stop and frisk” is the common name used to reference police stopping a pedestrian. Not all such stops actually result in a search or arrest.

Sara LaPlante, NYCLU’s data and policy analyst laid out two clear goals for us. First, provide data visualizations to help average New Yorkers contextualize their own personal experiences. For example, to answer questions such as in which precinct do the most pedestrian stops occur? On what days and at what time of day do the most pedestrian stops occur? The second goal was a much tougher question – is there a racial bias in pedestrian stops? Researchers have been tackling this question, specifically in NYC, for well over a decade. Most recently, Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss published a rather complex analysis of similar data in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

We were not able to make much significant progress on this second goal in a mere 48 hours. But we were able to provide NYCLU with some useful data visualizations, a dataset ready for analysis (typos corrected, locations translated to latitude and longitude for mapping, etc.), and some good ideas for next steps. The most challenging next step is acquiring disaggregated crime statistics for NYC, something we were surprised and frustrated was not readily available online.

Several of us plan to remain involved in NYCLU’s proposed analyses and look forward to staying in contact with Sara and the other members of the team. Descriptions of our project, plus the projects with MiX and Global Pulse, can be found on the Data Without Borders wiki.

The next Data Dive will be held here in San Francisco on Nov. 4-6 (tomorrow!), and I’ll switch from my statistician hat to my non-profit hat for that one – the human rights team is looking forward to supplying some of our own data and recruiting analytical assistance.

Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference

2011-10-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

This blog first appeared in the Huffington Post.

This week marked a first-ever gathering of human rights activists with Silicon Valley technology developers. The Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference hosted a series of discussions about how technology is used to expand and sometimes undermine essential freedoms around the world. 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.

This morning we saw live video of democracy protesters in Yemen who have been following the discussions via streaming video. The event helped create an extended dialog between participants of the Arab Spring and the developers of technology tools that activists have used to circumvent government censorship. We discussed strategies for holding companies accountable for human rights and encouraging the creation of products that respect the needs of their users.

The conference offered stark reminders of the pressures on human rights activists and the complicity of companies who yield to authoritarian regimes. The event kicked off with talks by two activists who may go to prison as a result of their online activities; Alaa Abd El-Fatah, an Egyptian blogger and software developer and Thai journalist Chiranuch Premchaiporn. Premchaiporn was charged after comments allegedly insulting the Thai royal family appeared on a website she edited. El-Fatah, who will face a military tribunal, noted that 12,000 Egyptian civilians are now being held in military prisons for participating in the revolution. El-Fatah said that rate limits on Twitter, real name policies on Facebook and the drive to monetize every online transaction, limits the usefulness of technology for activists.

Maria Al-Masani, founder of the Yemen Rights Monitor human rights group, told conference participants how her fellow activists have effectively used common applications to circumvent censorship. She recalled that when Yemen decided to ban Al-Jazeera, activists there bridged the gap by recording videos on their phones, posting the footage to YouTube and Facebook, linking content directly to the Al-Jazeera stream and then tweeting the story.

Despite the effectiveness of these tools, Bob Boorstin, the Director of Public Policy at Google, told participants that forty democratic and authoritarian regimes around the world are actively blocking free speech and companies are not doing enough to promote human rights. Google itself, he said, does not have a spotless record. "You've got to be ready to lose some money in order to protect human rights," said Boorstin to applause. "And not a lot of companies are ready for that."

El-Fatah noted that Vodafone offered no resistance to the Egyptian's government's request for a kill switch that shut down cell phone services during that country's Arab Spring. El-Fatah said companies should be pressured to resist having their products used to suppress dissent and think carefully about the rights of ordinary users. "We choose how to reveal who I am, on what terms and in what basis," said El-Fatah. "When you restrict me from doing this, you violate my human rights."

In the closing session, Lebanese activist Imad Bazzi noted that he had just gotten an email saying that two of his friends had just been killed in Syria. A stark reminder of the gravity of the risks that human rights activists take: that the stakes are not just freedom of speech, but freedom from being killed for your beliefs.

Benetech is a Silicon Valley nonprofit that has been writing software for the human rights movement for a decade. We talk about values-based approaches to helping activists. Patrick Ball, Benetech's chief scientist, spoke at the conference about the importance of coding human rights tools that meet the immediate needs of activists on the ground. He urged participants to remember that the reason the world pays attention to human rights activists that they speak truth to power. This has significant implications for database developers who must create tools that do not distort the information being captured or mislead decision makers with flawed analytics. Ball added that cryptographic protections to secure or authenticate information must be built into technological infrastructures.

"My colleagues and I at Benetech spend a lot of time working with people on the ground to figure out what's the strategic use of their information, and that is what the assessment needs to be about," said Ball. "It is not about the technology, it is not about platforms. It's about what are you trying to accomplish. How do we tell the truth? It is the vision of the mission goal that leads to successful projects, rather than just saying, 'I got a cool tool.'"

Ball added that activists need to create detailed narratives that help them get their work done efficiently in familiar formats. He said the databases that he will create in the next few years will look much less like a traditional database and more like a mash up between a wiki, a blog and Facebook.

I had the honor of giving the final talk to the conference to conclude its first day. I first got the idea for developing software for human rights when reading about the massacre of the 500 villagers in the village of El Mozote at the hands of a U.S.-trained battalion of the Salvadoran army. The incident made me wonder if technology could be developed to help prevent such atrocities, and that idea led to the creation of the open source Martus software for tracking and reporting on abuses.

I reminded participants that free speech alone is not enough to secure human rights. Human rights defenders process information and document violations, but these accounts get lost and computers are sometimes seized by authorities. Martus is used by organizations around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses. We need the persistence of human rights groups to secure accountability for violators.

My closing comments were designed to get more techies involved in helping defend the defenders of human rights:

I hope this is an inspiration about what our skills as technologists can do. If we can get this right, we will make human rights defenders stronger in their desperately unequal battle against perpetrators of large-scale human rights abuse.

Thanks to Ann Harrison for help with this post!

Correction noted: In the first version of this post, I incorrectly said that Alaa Abd El-Fatah had lost two friends in Syria, instead of Imad Bazzi.

Eliminating Blinding Trachoma

2011-10-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous two blogs about my Africa trip of last July, I had the pleasure of meeting many interesting people and learning about numerous exciting, cool projects during that three week long visit to Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana. In Ghana, I greatly enjoyed meeting Peter Ackland, CEO of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. Peter is spearheading the wonderful campaign Vision 2020 “The Right to Sight”: a global initiative seeking to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020. We sat under a tree and talked particularly about the race to eliminate trachoma, the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness and one of Vision 2020’s five priority diseases.

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. And that's Peter's goal as part of this effort.

Trachoma starts with a relatively benign infection of the eye with the bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis, which leads to inflammation of the tissue lining the eyelids (this is one of the causes of conjunctivitis, or “pink eye”). The condition is highly communicable and easily spreads via contact with dirty clothes, hands and flies that are attracted to people’s eyes. In its advanced stage, called trichiasis, repeated re-infection causes scarring of the eyelid, which then turns inward, scraping the cornea with every blink. The combination of repeat cornea trauma and secondary infections is excruciatingly painful and causes diminished vision and, eventually, blindness.

Trachoma has been around for thousands of years, but as the result of development and targeted interventions, it is now limited to an estimated 57 countries, often affecting poor, rural communities that lack the tools for basic hygiene, clean water and adequate sanitation. Today, an estimated 750,000 people are blind and at least 1 million suffer low vision due to trachoma. More than 4 million experience trichiasis, steadily and painfully progressing towards blindness, and hundreds of millions need treatment or are at risk of being infected. In addition to the human cost of the disease, its economic burden on the lives of individuals, families and communities is enormous. Kenya and Tanzania, among others, are considered “high burden countries,” defined as having more than 5 million people living in trachoma-confirmed and suspected areas.

The good news is that trachoma can effectively be eliminated. In 1999, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Peter’s International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness launched the VISION 2020 campaign, which has mobilized a community of partner organizations that have been working together towards the 2020 goal. They implement the WHO-endorsed SAFE (Surgery – Antibiotics – Facial Cleanliness – Environmental Improvements) strategy that’s been proven highly successful at eliminating trachoma in vulnerable populations, and they continually improve upon it by smart innovation.

At Benetech, we apply innovative technology to create new realities for people with blindness and other print disabilities. Of course, we are huge fans of prevention and applaud the efforts to get trachoma under control so that millions of people can be spared the painful and disabling path towards low vision and blindness. Controlling trachoma also has important auxiliary benefits to public health, such as improved sanitation and personal hygiene.

There’s great progress to report on: the first countries (among which is Ghana) have reached or are reaching their intervention goals and the total trachoma burden is shrinking. There are also significant challenges ahead and much more to do: reaching the 2020 milestone will depend on country leadership, international coordination, logistical and planning support, and adequate financing. But how heartening it is that the elimination of blinding trachoma – a disease that’s been recorded since Egyptian times – is now well within sight.

Benetech’s Daniel Guzmán Publishes Account of Landmark Guatemalan Human Rights Case

2011-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Benetech’s Human Rights Program supports critical human rights cases around the world helping to end impunity and bring justice to communities torn apart by violence. Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán has just published his account of one legal case which set a historic precedent for human rights in Guatemala. Guzmán’s article, entitled Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling, appears in the most recent issue of CHANCE, a quarterly journal published by the American Statistical Association. The story illustrates the crucial role that scientists can play in analyzing large collections of human rights data and presenting findings that can help hold perpetrators accountable for terrible crimes.

The article describes Guzmán’s presentation of key evidence in the trial of two former Guatemalan National Police agents accused of forcibly disappearing 26-year-old student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. A husband and father, García disappeared in 1984 after being detained by police on his way to work one morning. His family never stopped looking for him.

The Guatemalan Attorney General’s office summoned Guzmán to present evidence based on his analysis of random samples drawn from the millions of documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive. Discovered by chance in 2005 in an explosives storehouse in Guatemala City, the archive contains what archivists estimate to be 8 kilometers or approximately 80 million sheets, of paper. Many of the police documents contained in the archive were created during the country’s internal armed conflict from 1960 to 1996, during which an estimated tens of thousands of Guatemalans disappeared.

Benetech’s Human Rights Program was asked to help analyze the documents in this vast archive. We have been working in partnership with the archive staff who have been using Benetech’s Martus software to secure the data. Guzmán and his colleagues at Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group spent four years intensely analyzing the documents. In October 2010, Guzmán stood before three judges to defend his statistical findings, which supported the prosecutor’s case against the police officers. Statistical data are very seldom used as evidence in court cases in Guatemala, and defense attorneys were attempting to discredit his testimony.

One week after Guzmán presented his statistical evidence, the judges found the two former police officers guilty of forced disappearance and sentenced each to 40 years in prison. Analysis of the archive documents by Guzmán and his colleagues also provided critical information used to support the arrest in June 2011 of Hector Bol de la Cruz, the former chief of the Guatemalan National Police who is accused of complicity in García’s disappearance.

The arrest of a commanding officer accused of involvement in the many disappearances that took place during Guatemala’s 36 years of armed internal conflict is a big step towards justice in that country. The statistical evidence that Guzmán presented in the García case set a precedent for this type of analysis in court and we are proud of him. Guzmán’s groundbreaking testimony will help judges trust the validity of the archive documents and accept statistical evidence in future human rights cases. I urge you to read Guzmán’s compelling account of how he helped build the case against the former police officers, the trial, the verdict, and its long term implications for justice in Guatemala.

My Guide Dog Ate My Paycheck

2011-09-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

Brownbag lunches are a regular feature at Benetech, and one of our most popular regular speakers is Bookshare team member Liz Halperin.
Liz had just gotten back from getting her new guide dog, Welton. She told an enthralled audience all about the ten stages of guide dog training and the process of being matched up with a dog. Her prior guide dog had not been all that successful and she had to switch after just two years (5-9 being more typical for the length of guiding service).

The highlight of the talk was when she took the apparently mellow Wellie off his harness and then he dashed around the room to be petted by 30-40 people.

The funniest thing was her description of her prior dog's love of eating paper: the dog actually ate her Benetech paycheck. Our CFO, Teresa Throckmorton, explained that she switched Liz to being paid by wire transfers. As a dog owner, I know that they can sometimes chew through money, but this was ridiculous!

Making the Book Truly Accessible for All Students

2011-09-21T05:50:00.000-07:00

Schools are back in session, and with them millions of American children who struggle daily to learn using traditional printed books. Having learning disabilities or various learning differences, they need alternative reading environments that rely on their strengths rather than on their weaknesses. This includes accessible educational materials, such as e-books that can be used with computers, or mobile devices that display enlarged text or read the book aloud while also highlighting text.

We have the technological innovations to help these children and their families and educators, who are looking for strategies to aid their success. Yet, we are still far from where we need to be in order to give them equal opportunity to succeed in school and beyond.

In September 2007, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) selected our successful Booksharelibrary as the provider of accessible materials to every student in the U.S. with a legally qualifying print disability per the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act. We’re extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished with Bookshare over the past four years and are hopeful that by the end of our OSEP contract term, we’ll have delivered double the results we initially proposed. Bookshare has grown into the largest online digital library of accessible books and periodicals in the U.S., with a collection of over 126,000 books (and counting) that currently serves more than 148,000 members, including over 143,000 students.

Qualifying students, however, represent but a small fraction of those who can benefit from accessible books. Everyday, we have to turn down students who are disadvantaged and need reading accommodations, but are not “disadvantaged enough” to be considered qualified for Bookshare services. Nor can they buy accessible content from the commercial sector.

The International Dyslexia Association calls these students “SEEDS kids,” for “struggling readers, English language learners, economically disadvantaged youth, dyslexia students and specific learning disability students.” They include struggling readers whose learning problems have never been fully diagnosed. Economically disadvantaged individuals are more likely to report having learning disabilities than the rest of the population. Plus, this includes individuals with mild dyslexia and those with a variety of specific learning and other disabilities. Thousands of students with differing learning styles and language requirements can also benefit greatly from accessible books.

There are some 7.5 million students (15% of the U.S. public school population) who could benefit from accessible books but currently go without them or get them at great cost in both time and funds to schools and educators. They deserve an equal shot at learning and realizing their potential.

Benetech is working on a new program that will serve these students who are not qualified under the copyright exemption. We call it Bookaccess: a cost effective “fulfillment engine” that will deliver digital accessible books to commercial partners (like publishers) who would sell them to customers.

The conditions for launching Bookaccess are on our side: technology convergence is making the production of accessible digital content simply a click of a button away; the federal government is pushing states to find methods to meet the special needs of all their students; and we already get tremendous support from publishers.
We revolutionized the accessibility of books through Bookshare for people with severe print-related disabilities. Our next bold step is to diffuse this innovation into the service of all of humanity who might need it!

Public speaking for change

2011-09-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

I originally started this blog as a way to keep more of our Benetech team aware of what was going on with me and other team members (through guest blogs) while on our travels. Many of us spend a big chunk of our time on the road rather than in the office, and it's good to share some of the reasons our office chairs are often empty!

Speaking publicly is an important part of our work. We do it both to advance Benetech objectives and projects, as well as advancing the field (we call these karma gigs). We invest in public speaking coaching (thanks, Melinda Henning!) to become better speakers, both for old hands like me and Benetechers getting ready for their first public speech.

I asked Joan Mellea, who keeps track of these and many other things at Benetech, about my upcoming speaking commitments: she quickly came up with fifteen! More than ten of these are in just the next two months. So, I thought I'd share what's coming up to give a flavor of where in the world Jim will be in the next two months (the other four talks are scheduled for next year already). Of course, I have other trips planned for just meetings as well.

9/19 (tomorrow!) Speed Geeking at the Gates Foundation Global Library Program about Bookshare International

9/22 Stanford Social Innovation Review online webinar "Nonprofit, For-profit, or Something in Between?"on choosing to be a nonprofit or a for-profit, based on my For Love or Lucre SSIR article

9/26 Kicking off the Stanford Social Entrepreneurship Lecture Series

10/1 Speaking at the Disability Rights Advocates board meeting

10/5 Duke Fuqua MBA High Tech Club Panel (Cloud Computing /Social Entrepreneurship panels)

10/5 Duke CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation, presentation and lecture

10/25-26 Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference

10/29 Keynote at Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired Regional conference in Cleveland, Ohio

11/2 Moderate a CEO's panel at the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit in Chicago

11/5 Address a foundation board meeting in Connecticut

11/20 Short inspirational talk at TEDxYouthCastilleja (high school in Palo Alto where my wife Virginia used to teach: we had our wedding reception there)

All of these talks are about social innovation, about technology doing social good, about the possibility that everybody can do something to help. Sharing these ideas is the way I recharge my batteries for doing more!

Read2Go Tops iTunes Literacy Charts!

2011-09-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

Gerardo Capiel, Benetech's VP Engineering, just sent me a couple of exciting screen shots on our Read2Go iOS application for accessible reading of ebooks. The first one shows the Special Education category on iTunes, with the Read2Go logo being used to represent the Literacy and Learning section.

And, the second one shows why: our Read2Go application is at the top of the Literacy and Learning section!
We also are just about through the process with the first major upgrade to Read2Go since its release, with a bunch of fixes and improvements requested by our users.

Zerofootprint: A Cool Approach to Sustainability

2011-09-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

We’ve been exploring the area of sustainability a great deal lately. We have some new ideas for software Benetech could be developing. But, one of our core values is to see what’s already out there and to not duplicate great work already being done. That means we frequently run into cool projects (and mentally check the box: taken care of!).

In this exploration effort, thanks to John Danner, the incredibly connected entrepreneur who hangs his hat occasionally at the Haas Business School in Berkeley, I was able to meet Dr. Ron Dembo, founder of Zerofootprint. Ron showed me a brief demo at TED and we followed up with a more extensive demonstration more recently.

Zerofootprint is working to make a dent in minimizing climate change, by changing people’s behavior. And, it’s not clear that making the scientific case is sufficient for people to change. But the reality is that people don’t even need to buy the scientific case for climate change to take actions that address the issue: wouldn’t everybody like to save money on energy efficiency if it was painless or easy? 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. What blew my mind in the demonstration was how the Zerofootprint team took a metro area’s schools, and mashed the energy consumption data together with student census data to demonstrate how much the energy costs by dollar per student per year.

As a human, I zero in right away on the schools that are spending ten times as much per student as their most efficient comparable schools in the same neighborhood. Are they running the heat with the windows open during the winter? Are they using a boiler built in 1910? Do they leave the lights on in all the classrooms all night?

Shining a light on this issue, and making it easy to understand, is the first step on changing behavior. Zerofootprint supports the running of contests between schools (or whatever unit you want to pick). Suddenly, we have a tool to focus on the most wasteful schools, and to help all schools improve their energy efficiency.

Zerofootprint is an exciting social enterprise, and one I hope to see gain expanded adoption. It shows how crunching the numbers plus a great data visualization approach, offers a great example of how technology can really serve humanity!

JVIB 2012 Special Issue on Technology: Today's Game Changer

2011-08-31T05:43:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to be a guest editor with the awesome Donna McNear on next year's special technology issue of the Journal of Vision Impairment and Blindness. JVIB is the peer-reviewed journal of record in the field of vision loss, and a past tech issue in 2003 featured my article, In the Palm of Your Hand, a vision of what mobile devices would mean for blind people in the future (a future that has already happened, of course!).

Donna and I are looking for forward looking articles that will inform the field of what might happen in the future. Technology is advancing at such a pace that so many topics are possible, but to just name a few:

Mobile (what might happen next!?)
Web infrastructure and accessibility of/through the cloud
The power of free
New technology for giving blind people the ability to tackle tasks that used to require vision
Convergence between mainstream technology and assistive technology
Novel and/or innovative applications of technology for teaching and education
Novel and/or innovative applications of technology in the workplace
What technology advances mean for the future of Braille
And so many other possibilities!

Of course, this is a peer reviewed journal and being guest editors doesn't give us the power to decide what does and doesn't get published. But, we would so very much like technology innovators in the field of vision loss and blindness to propose exciting articles that will help the field move forward to maximize results for the people we all serve!

The deadline for submissions is in January 31, 2012,and the call for papers is here. Help us make this a terrific issue!

DIAGRAM Center

2011-08-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I just attended two days of meetings in Washington DC on the first year of the DIAGRAM Center, held at the Office of Special Education Programs in the Department of Education. The goal of the DIAGRAM R&D Center is to greatly improve access to graphical information for students with print disabilities (for example, helping blind students get access to important graphics inside textbooks). This is becoming crucially important as the problem of delivering access to text is increasingly solved by the move to ebook publishing and solutions like our Bookshare library. Of course, just as we're solving the text problem, more and more content is moving to richer, more visual forms like graphics, simulations and flash!

The first exciting part of our work has been delivered by the National Center on Accessible Media, one of our two key partners in DIAGRAM (along with the DAISY Consortium). The initial part of the project was to do a detailed survey of existing assistive technology products, to get a baseline for current support for accessible graphics. But, it’s turned out to be one of the best surveys of assistive technology we’ve ever seen. Should be a huge resource for the field: check out the product matrices in the Research and Development section of the DIAGRAM web site.

We are also building a content model for making images more accessible. The intention is to define an XML content model which will make it easier to present alternatives to the original graphical content for persons who are blind or print disabled. We are using the modular approach of the DAISY Authoring and Interchange Framework, which defines modules and profiles for the representation of books, journals, etc. Using this modular approach, HTML and EPUB documents would have graphical elements linked to specific instances of descriptions or image alternatives that use the content model. So, a blind student looking at a complex scientific diagram for their high school science course would be able to hear a detailed description of the main elements in that diagram. The goal is to be able to gain access to the same learning a sighted student would get from that diagram.

I saw an initial demonstration of a web-based image description tool, called Poet. This makes it possible for people describing graphics (publisher production people, illustrators, alternative media producers like Benetech, and volunteers) to work from a standard web browser and interactively add image descriptions to DAISY books. The described book can then be re-published and made available to users who wish to have image descriptions voiced by digital talking book software tools or players, or have the descriptions in Braille.

We’ve also engaged in a major technical standards issue. The main tool for image description in the current version of HTML has been the LONGDESC attribute. It can be attached to a graphic, and many assistive technology products (like screen readers for the blind) know how to alert the user to the existence of a long description and how to read it aloud (or provide it in refreshable Braille). There had been a recommendation in the HTML 5 standards process to drop LONGDESC, that was greatly concerning to us. We're hearing a startling lack of sensitivity to accessibility in this process. With some of the other top leaders working on DIAGRAM, we need to inform the disability activists of this issue before it's too late!

Bookshare Users Downloading Long-Awaited Apple e-Book App

2011-08-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

Benetech got a call recently from an excited Bookshare member who had been waiting to download our new Read2Go accessible e-book application for Apple devices. Graduate student Maria Georgakarakou, who is blind, gave us a rave review for the Read2Go app which allows those with print disabilities to listen to books in the DAISY audio format.

Maria was especially excited about Read2Go’s navigation features that allow her to search and download accessible e-books from our Bookshare library directly to her iPad and iPhone. In addition to being a Bookshare member, Maria is a book scanner and volunteer proofreader. She predicted that the usability of Read2Go will encourage Bookshare members to read more books in the DAISY audio format.

Maria also noted that students like herself are finding more scholarly books on Bookshare which expands her ability to research. Maria is a historical musicologist who is pursuing her PhD at Boston University. She studies secular songs and theater music from the English Baroque period of the 1600’s. According to Maria, books in the DAISY format have the same page numbering as the text which is a big benefit to scholars who need precise citations.

The Read2Go application was developed by Bookshare’s parent nonprofit Benetech in partnership with Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd which is known for its PLEXTALK® brand of digital talking book players. Read2Go offers word-by-word highlighting with simultaneous text to speech that supports multi-modal reading. Our Bookshare members will also get access to additional features such as study tools, images and multiple languages as the application develops.

Daproim and Steve Muthee, its founder

2011-07-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

As I noted in my first blog on my African trip, I was delighted with the entrepreneurial culture in Nairobi, Kenya. A social entrepreneur who very much exemplified this was Stephen Muthee, founder of Daproim, a data entry social enterprise based in Nairobi.
We were introduced to Steve and Daproim through the great offices of Leila Janah and Samasource, the "Give Work" people. Leila's dream has been to connect the people of East Africa with dignified digital work, and connecting Steve to our Bookshare team has been highly successful for Daproim, Samasource and Bookshare! It's part of what we call our social enterprise supply chain.
It's so cool to come into an office in Nairobi's Central Business District and see a couple of dozen people working on transcribing textbooks for Bookshare's users with print disabilities. Steve wanted me to work my way around the office shaking everybody's hand! I was happy to thank everybody for their work on behalf of our Bookshare members, and letting them know how important that work is for giving our members an equal shot at education.

And, of course, that's just what Daproim is all about. It's a for-profit social enterprise, with a focus on employing disadvantaged people. Steve hires people from disadvantaged backgrounds, both from the poorer parts of Nairobi as well as university students with impoverished rural backgrounds and people with disabilities.

It was talking about the university students where Steve, a highly animated entrepreneur, gets even more enthusiastic. He wants to provide these students with a part-time job that provides for their school fees, the purchase of a PC and enough money to send some home. He notes that students with these backgrounds have already overcome great obstacles, and he sees that they have the skills and the motivation to do high quality data entry work. And, of course, it was that high quality work product that Samasource connected with us in the first place, and now has been sustained for several years.

Steve shared that the Bookshare contract really was the turning point for his business. Up until that point, Steve was doing the family and friends fund raising thing to keep his business afloat. Steve especially noted the support he received from his mother, a farmer in rural Kenya, for keeping Daproim going until the business took off. And, now he's expanded into other areas of the data entry business, which is now the majority of his business.
I wrapped up my visit by demonstrating our new Read2Go iPad application to Jackie, who Steve described as one of his hardest working data entry employees. Of course, I showed off a textbook!

I'm really glad that Samasource connected us with Steve and Daproim, and that the partnership is working so well. It so clearly shows the benefit of what the Rockefeller Foundation calls Impact Sourcing. We see it as having our limited money working twice as hard: once to get the service we need (textbooks transformed into high quality accessible form for people who have disabilities) as well as creating great digital jobs for people in disadvantaged communities!

Breakthrough on Global Access at WIPO in Geneva!

2011-07-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

There has been a major breakthrough recently on international copyright negotiations in Geneva around improved access for people who have print disabilities. Through negotiations, four competing proposals have been merged into a single document supported in June by the Latin Americans (led by Brazil), the U.S., the European Union and others.

Here are some questions and answers I've prepared on this topic, based on my recent trip to Geneva to attend the first week of discussions on the issue.

1. Question: What are the two key points of the document?

Answer:
• Countries should provide for a copyright exception in their national laws to allow nonprofit organizations serving people with disabilities to make accessible versions of inaccessible books and other content
• Import and export of such accessible materials shall be permitted

2. Question: Why is this a good idea?

Answer: A copyright exception makes it much easier for people with print disabilities to get access to the materials they need for education, employment and social inclusion. The United States enacted such a copyright exception (the “Chafee Amendment,” Section 121 of Title 17 of the United States Code), and as a result Americans with print disabilities have the best and most extensive collections of accessible books in the world. In addition, a copyright exception is a crucial mechanism for countries to live up to several of their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (which many countries have signed and ratified).

3. Question: How would this help Americans with print disabilities?

Answer: Many Americans want to access materials from other countries, both in English and many other languages, for education, employment and cultural reasons. Allowing import of accessible materials from other countries would improve access for Americans with print disabilities. In addition, the two national organizations of blind people both just passed formal resolutions in favor of the treaty proposal.

4. Question: How would this help people with print disabilities globally?

Answer: People with print disabilities, especially in the developing world, lack fundamental access to content available to other people. This places them at a tremendous disadvantage in having equal opportunity, especially in the areas of education and employment. If these proposed provisions took effect, it would be easier for communities of people with disabilities to build their own accessible collections inside their own countries. In addition, countries with linguistic links to richer countries (i.e., the U.S., UK, France, Spain) would have access to crucially important cultural, vocational and educational materials.

5. Question: How does the draft document define print disability?

Answer: The current draft defines print disability in functional terms. For example, a person who “is unable to read printed works to substantially the same degree as a person without an impairment or disability.”

6. Question: What’s the big open issue remaining?

Answer: The draft document is structured so that it can be put forward either as a recommendation or a draft treaty. The advocates for people with disabilities strongly favor a treaty. They note that whenever industry wants intellectual property action globally, they only want a treaty: why should people with disabilities settle for a softer alternative? The European Union (especially France) does not want a treaty, and is supported in this by the United States. A two-step process has been proposed (recommendation followed by treaty), but the advocates have not seriously engaged in this option.

7. Question: Why do publishers and intellectual property industries object to a treaty?

Answer: It’s hard for the publishers to object to the idea of people with disabilities having accessible materials. Many authors and publishers have long voluntarily supported such accessibility through permissions agreements. However, publishers and related industries are generally against copyright limitations and exceptions, as part of a general effort to increase their control over intellectual property and business models and constrain technological innovation that threatens that control. The movie and recording industries have made the most negative statements about the treaty: [it would] “begin to dismantle the existing global treaty structure of copyright law, through the adoption of an international instrument at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms.” But, they love anything that strengthens intellectual property regulations, of course.

8. Question: Why should the U.S. Government support this effort?

Answer: The United States under the current administration has made a laudable statement of support for accessibility for people with disabilities, and the need to strike a balance between the interest of publishers and the community of persons with disabilities. One key point: it’s been the law of the land in the U.S. for more than 15 years, and it’s worked great! If it’s good enough for the U.S., as one of the leading lights in both intellectual property regulation and inclusion of people with people with disabilities, it should be good enough for the rest of the world!

Conclusion

The goal is pretty clear: insuring that every person on the planet with a serious print disability has access to the books and other printed material that they need to get an education, make a living and be included in society. It is abundantly clear that the great majority of people in the world who cannot pick up a book and read it effectively are at a terrific disadvantage in society. This effort at WIPO, if successful, should change this sorry state of affairs!

Kipp and Philip of the Social Development Network in east Africa

2011-07-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

I've just ended an exciting three week long Africa trip to Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana. There are so many exciting people and organizations to talk about! 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.

I dropped in on them because Kipp had been trained on our Martus human rights software years ago and had been helping human rights groups in the region with using Martus. However, I was thrilled with the incredible range of activities I heard about during our dinner together.

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. They felt these new initiatives would all contribute to a better human rights environment in the region.

One of the first areas was a budget tracking tools for Kenya, to make it easier for people to learn about budgeted amounts for their areas. Huduma makes it easy for people to complain about social services delivery (like, I went to the clinic but they don't have the drug I need).

Uchaguzi was a crowd-sourcing tool SODNET worked together with Ushahidi to deliver around the recent Kenyan referendum. They are also planning on tracking next year's elections in Kenya. Given the election violence of a few years ago, this is a major area of work in Kenya to help prevent a re-occurrence. They've also done a similar project in Tanzania and Uganda.

Our discussion of these projects and new ideas was exciting: the barriers to implementing new ideas with technology keep getting smaller. Even better, I think these technology innovations are best done in close touch with the community. I was impressed with the ambition, scope and execution of these projects, and their potential to advance social justice and human rights in east Africa!

Bookshare User Sends Haiku

2011-07-06T02:57:00.000-07:00

A guest Beneblog by Lindsie Verma of the Bookshare Team

Hot Fall Sun hangs low

Cooling breeze ruffles oak tree

Beneath, small boy reads.

And now, as an old man, that boy is still reading. Thanks! –Don Meyer, Bookshare user.

We get a lot of emails from happy users, but never before have we received gratitude in Haiku-form! When we asked Don for permission to post his haiku, he said, "It was very gratifying to find that you, and your team, enjoyed the haiku. As I said to you before, that boy was me. Even now I can still see the sunlight filtering through the oak trees, the shadows, the life that surrounded me as I read poetry under the oaks in front of Crown Point Country School. Even as early as the third grade I had learned to sit quietly and observe everything with the whole of my body, all senses. I did not start to write poetry until my late thirties, though, when, finally, all the bottled up emotions began to emerge. I know, now, that my 'journey of a thousand miles' had already begun."

Born in the early 17^th century, Haiku as a literary form was a product of the game Renga in which poets wrote alternating stanzas to create poems with sound unit counts known as "on." From this pastime grew the three-line, 17-syllable literary form we know it as today. This form of poetry has risen in popularity in the west, though it has come a long way from its beginnings in feudal Japan. Traditional Japanese Haiku tended to focus narrowly on nature, whereas modern Haiku take on a bevy of topics. Take for example Hipster Haiku in which the author rages against her urban setting, a far cry from the outdoor scenes set by Bashō. No matter the topic, Haiku spans the linguistic divide as a universal form of artistic expression.

Bookshare collection

Haiku books few but varied

For your enjoyment:

Cat Haiku by Deborah Coates

Gay Haiku by Joel Derfner

Haiku: Seasons of Japanese Poetry by Johanna Brownell

Hipster Haiku by Siobhan Adcock.

On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho by Matsuo Basho

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Our WIPO Statement on the Treaty for Access for People with Disabilities

2011-06-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

Statement of Benetech to the
22nd Session of the
Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights

at the World Intellectual Property Organization
June 15, 2011, Geneva, Switzerland

• Greetings from California’s Silicon Valley! I’m a high tech engineer and the founder of Benetech, one of Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit technology companies, dedicated to seeing that the benefits of technology help all of humanity, not just the richest 10%
• As a nonprofit charity, we focus on areas of market failure, where regular for-profit companies have decided that the market opportunity for a given product is not large enough
• One of our best-known programs is the Bookshare library, the largest online library of accessible books in the world, a library dedicated to serving the one or two percent of the population with a severe print disability
• Since I last spoke to this body less than one year ago at SCCR20, the Bookshare library has grown from serving 100,000 people with print disabilities, to over 140,000. Our collection has grown from 70,000 books to almost 110,000 books in the U.S.
• This rapid increase in our collection size has been due to extensive support from publishers: the majority of new books added to Bookshare last year and this year have been voluntarily provided to us by 130 publisher partners in the U.S., Canada, Europe and India. These include 6 of the top 10 publishers in the U.S.
• These publisher agreements have also included permissions to distribute books outside the United States: most frequently, we are provided global rights. Now, more than 30,000 current copyrighted books are available globally on Bookshare to thousands of users.
• As a result, we are increasingly working with other disability organizations in other countries to extend Bookshare’s ability to serve people with disabilities. For example, all residents with the qualifying disabilities in Australia, Denmark and Qatar, to pick just three examples, now have free access to Bookshare thanks to our joint efforts with local and national disability groups in these countries. Bookshare now has hundreds of titles in Hindi, Tamil, and Spanish, and we recently announced a partnership with the government of Qatar to develop an Arabic language service.
• Bookshare has successfully piloted an international library for the blind, but we’ve barely begun to remedy the global book famine.
• Wonderful as our licensing partnerships with publishers are, they are not enough to make accessible most of the books that people with disabilities need to have equal access to education, employment and social inclusion.
• In the United States, like a number of countries, we have a copyright exception that allows our organization to make accessible versions of the books our disabled patrons need. We have spent years making arrangements with 130 exceptionally responsible publishers, but our copyright exception has allowed us to make books available from thousands of publishers. We think this exception has worked extraordinarily well in the U.S.: helping people with disabilities while not hurting, and almost certainly helping, authors and publishers
• This is why we are in strong support of the World Blind Union’s advocacy and many nations’ support for a global treaty to help people with print disabilities. We would like to see a global norm comparable to the system that has worked so well in the U.S. extended to help all people with print disabilities in the world who need it. Thank you!

New Benetech board member, Robert Wexler

2011-06-13T04:04:00.000-07:00

Our Nonprofit Legal Expert Continues to Offer Wise Advice

My last post mentioned our recent Benetech board meeting. This seemed like a great moment to introduce our newest board member, Robert Wexler.

Rob has a deep understanding of what makes nonprofits successful. He’s a principal at Adler & Colvin, San Francisco's top law firm specializing in nonprofit law. His practice focuses on tax and corporate matters for nonprofits and their donors. Rob is also a lecturer at Stanford Law School where he teaches the Law of Nonprofit Organizations.

Rob has helped Benetech navigate important transitions over the years including providing critical legal advice during the sale of the Arkenstone product line in 2000, including expanding our charter from just working on disability issues to a wider range of social issues (now including human rights and the environment). Proceeds from the sale of the Arkenstone reading machine for the blind provided the capital to fund Benetech and launch many new technology projects that serve humanity. As part of the Arkenstone sales, Rob also helped us create a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary to protect our nonprofit status (by having a taxable subsidiary handle unrelated business income, the nonprofit parent was better protected). Rob also helped me with my recent essay in the Spring 2011 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, For Love or Lucre that offers practical guidelines for social entrepreneurs who want to start for-profit or nonprofit companies.

Rob is committed to the success of social enterprises. He has served as a board member and officer on several nonprofit boards and has donated his time for the Volunteer Legal Services Program of the Bar Association of San Francisco. I particularly have appreciated his help with the SF chapter of the Social Enterprise Alliance, a national organization I helped found and am now the immediate past chair. He's also been part of the effort to propose the Flexible Purpose Corporation here in California, an effort I strongly support to allow for-profit corporations to add a social purpose into their basic organizational charter.

We will look to Rob for advice and guidance as Benetech continues to explore new technologies that help empower underserved communities. We are fortunate to have his experience, intellect and deep dedication to innovative social change on Benetech's governing body!

Human Rights at the Benetech Board Meeting

2011-06-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

The centerpiece of our Benetech board of directors meeting this week was the Benetech Human Rights Program. Each of our quarterly meetings tends to focus on big strategic issues facing Benetech. Last quarter Betsy Beaumon presented the future of our Literacy program including Bookshare. Next quarter will be our new projects meeting, where we talk about the pipeline of new ideas for Benetech social enterprises. But this week, human rights was front and center.

Patrick Ball, our Chief Scientist and VP of the Human Rights Program, spent a couple of hours with our board talking about the big strategic questions for the HRP. 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.

Our human rights program has many important moving parts:

Improving the science of human rights statistics
Doing major projects to help a country figure out what happened in the last ten or twenty years of civil wars
Helping both academics and prosecutors get data usable for their needs
Building technology tools like Martus for capturing human rights violations data
Talking to high tech companies about how their policies help and/or hurt the cause of human rights
Training new scientists in our methods (increasingly our alums are taking on major projects for other major human rights programs)
Talking to journalists and documentary film makers about how to protect their data in the field
Training human rights groups all over the world on how to collect and secure their data for maximum impact on improving human rights

All of this is of course through the lens of serving the human rights movement: Benetech's HRP is all about helping human rights groups achieve their goals of defending and advancing respect for human rights. If the groups we're working with don't succeed, then we don't succeed.

Selection bias was one of Patrick's core scientific topics: the tendency of humans to believe that the information they get represents the big picture. One hypothetical example of this issue that came up in the meeting was SMS traffic after a large earthquake and tsunami. You might think that the amount of traffic corresponds to the places that would have the most damage. But, it might well have been that the places with the greatest damage had no power for the phone system, or people were too busy with the aftermath of the disaster, compared to more mildly affected cities with power and relatively little damage (but people texting like crazy to say they are ok). How do we help decision-makers and the press get a better handle on what we know and don't know, and prevent people from leaping to the wrong conclusions (and by extension, taking the wrong actions)?

We're lucky at Benetech to have very smart and engaged board. And, I think our board felt good about investing the time to engage in such an intellectually stimulating topic of immense importance.

George Hara: Public Interest Venture Capitalist

2011-06-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

Longtime Beneblog readers may remember my visit five years ago to Bangladesh, where I was able to visit and write about a cool tech social enterprise, bracNet. They were going to bring Bangladesh better wireless internet than exists in California, and they’ve done it.

I recently had the opportunity to visit with one of their main funders, George Hara, in San Francisco. George is a financial mastermind with one foot in Asia and the other in California. Public Interest Capitalism is his personal brand of social change. A longtime venture capitalist with his DEFTA Partners firm, he wants to help solve social problems using hybrid capital structures that meld nonprofit and for-profit partners. He uses the Alliance Forum Foundation as one of his vehicles for making deals along these lines in Asia and Africa. He's written several papers on his approach, including this one entitled Retooling Capitalism.

bracNet is one of these hybrid ventures, joining a majority for-profit ownership led by DEFTA Partners with BRAC, Bangladesh’s largest social enterprise organization. BRAC can use its tax-exempt dividends to fund public service projects related to bracNet’s wireless internet connectivity (or for other public purposes, as it decides).

In our conversation, George and his team outlined ways to use this hybrid approach for expanding social impact in Africa as well as new ideas for enterprises for following up on natural disasters in Asia for sustaining positive change after the immediate humanitarian response.

It was a pleasure for me to make the connection with a cool technology play, and see that it was also a cool hybrid financial structure.

Caltech and Sustainability

2011-05-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

When I can find the time, I jump at the opportunity to visit universities. It stimulates the same pleasure center that brainstorming does for me! The universities I visit tend to be full of students and faculty committed to doing important and innovative work.

My recent visit to Caltech was no exception. Of course, I have a soft spot for Caltech, having gotten my two degrees there. It was a class at Caltech that prompted me to first think of making reading machines for blind people, my personal jumping off point that led me to found Benetech (hmm, name similarity probably not a coincidence!). I no longer do any of the scientific work I was trained to do. But, Caltech taught me how to size up a problem and model how a system works: skills that have been indispensable in both my entrepreneurial and social entrepreneurial pursuits!

The most exciting thread of the day concerned sustainability. I was turned on to climate and energy issues six years ago by reading Caltech professor David Goodstein’s book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil. Caltech faculty and students are especially focused on sustainability. Caltech even has the new Resnick Institute established to address this issue. This is an increasing area of interest for me and Benetech, so these were great connections to make.

My student host, Cole Hershkowitz, demonstrated this sustainability focus. Although he’s a few weeks away from graduating, he’s spending a huge amount of time on the SCI-Arc/Caltech joint entry in the international Social Decathlon competition. It’s so cool! Teams from around the world build houses that are expected to be zero in net energy usage: they should generate enough energy to sustain themselves, and be built for less than a certain sum (I think about $350k is the limit).

Getting into the design of a net-zero house was a cool thought experiment for me, but the team is actually building their house right now. They’ve already raised $800k of the $1.1-1.2 million they need to build the house and transport it to the Mall in Washington DC for the judging. In my day, an expensive student project cost a couple of thousand dollars. I think their biggest issue is trying to find a transportation company who would be able to move their net-zero house from LA to DC. If you know a trucking company with a sustainability urge, send them towards Cole and his team!

The students are, of course, the treasure of a place like Caltech. I was able to meet those Tech students who really want to make a difference in the world, more than just figuring out the latest science or tech breakthrough (wonderful as that is). I was able to meet with three separate sets of students, both undergraduate and graduate students, and get into conversations about how to get started in social innovation.

And lastly, staying in Caltech’s faculty club, the Athenaeum, is a real treat. The first big dinner held there was in honor of Albert Einstein’s extended visit to Caltech in the 1930s. You just to have to imagine thinking better and more creative thoughts while dreaming in a place where Einstein once slept!

Martus: The Next Generation

2011-05-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

Benetech brainstorms are always a treat: it's a chance for all of us to step back and imagine how much more and better we could be doing for our users. Today, Captain Patrick (Ball, not Stewart), our VP Human Rights, led a brainstorm on the next major upgrade of our Martus secure human rights database software with our human rights program team as well as key technical leaders.

The graphic above was delivered to us purporting to be our agenda. It kicked off our meeting with even greater enthusiasm. Human rights is serious work, but it always helps to be inspired!

And Jeff Klingner (who cooked this up) asked that I credit CBS Studios for the still from Star Trek: The Next Generation and superlame.com for the captioning technology!

Day at University of Washington

2011-05-17T17:08:00.000-07:00

Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series

Benetech Truth #1: Social Change Through Technology

2011-05-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

[Note: this is part one of seven posts on the Benetech Truths.]

The world has big problems. We need fresh, original solutions that are better than the status quo. Technology has revolutionized business, but bringing those breakthrough developments to government, education and the nonprofit sectors can take 5, 10, even 15 years. It doesn’t have to be that way.

We’re convinced that there are many innovative social applications of technology could make a 5X or a 10X or even a 15X improvement over status quo solutions.

At Benetech, our team is committed to using technology to drive positive social change. We want to see technology serve much more of humanity than just the richest ten percent. We use technology to create products and projects that serve humanity where the market will fail to go because they offer modest financial returns.

To create these breakthrough solutions, our team uses its skills to build upon the incredible talents and productivity of the larger tech community. We just bridge the gap between possibility and profitability. We see what’s already possible with technology, and build what we call the “last social mile.”

Our work to date repeatedly demonstrates bridging this market failure gap:

Our Literacy team has reinvented the traditional library for the blind, reducing the cost of producing an accessible book by a factor of 100 and ending the book famine that people who are blind or print disabled have faced for years. Through our Bookshare online library, they now have equal access to the books they need for education, employment and full participation in society!

Our Human Rights team is bringing the power of technology to the defenders of human rights. When activists speak truth to power, we help them to ensure that it is truth! We help to protect the testimonies of the victims of violations, as well as the safety of those who take their statements. We are database experts who help to answer the key question in human rights: who did what to whom? We are expert witnesses in war crimes trials, helping bring an end to impunity.

Our Environmental team is helping to bring results-based management to the conservation and biodiversity field. We want to help environmentalists do a better job of stewarding our precious natural assets. We help them to do more of what works, less of what doesn’t, and see that donor dollars are applied for maximum impact.

And we’re nowhere near done! We are expanding our new projects pipeline, growing our capacity to make social change through technology. We’re working hard on building our field: making it easier for other techies to follow their dreams of doing the most important work they can possibly do. We invest time in sharing how Benetech and other technology social enterprises work, and write essays and articles on how to start and run social enterprises. (To see one example, check out my recent paper “For Love or Lucre” on how to decide whether to be a nonprofit or for-profit when starting a social enterprise.) We’re also developing a new platform, Beneforge, to make it easier to engage with new and existing projects both inside and outside Benetech, applying technology to achieve positive social change.

We hope that you’ll join this movement and realize the true dream of the technical person: to work on challenges that Matter!

Benetech: President's Update

2011-05-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

Benetech President's Update

Winter 2011

I’m pleased to provide you you a detailed update on Benetech for the first time in two years. Last summer I talked about our great summer interns and fellows and early this year, I sent a copy of our 20th Anniversary Report that talked about our entire history. Reviewing where we were at the beginning of 2009, it’s amazing to see the growth in impact that Benetech and our team have had in the world. It’s worth celebrating but even more important, worth recognizing the incredible opportunities that we now have to make a difference on an even broader scale. I’m spending more and more of my time trying to figure out what’s next for Benetech—how we can do much more.

Bookshare Hits 100,000 Members

Since the beginning of 2009, we’ve tripled the number of people with disabilities Bookshare is serving with our accessible library of ebooks. For years, our extraordinary cohort of dedicated volunteer scanners has provided Bookshare with most of its new content. This past year, we’re getting most of our content directly from top publishers: high-quality digital content for free. Our volunteers, together with these socially responsible publishers, are making sure that our members have the content they need. We just added 847 books to the collection in one day—that’s more than we used to add in a month! All of this means that when people living with a disability such as blindness, severe dyslexia, or a significant physical disability (such as our returning veterans who may have polytrauma) come looking for a specific book they need for education, employment or simple enjoyment, we’re much more than likely to have it available for them in an accessible format.

The amazing thing about serving 100,000 students right now is that our commitment to the U.S. Department of Education was to serve 100,000 students by the end of our five-year contract in late 2012. Based on hitting that number two years early, we’re now projecting that we could serve perhaps twice as many students, 200,000, by the 2012 milestone date. And the price to the Dept. of Education won’t change: we’ll do twice as much for the same price. I know that funders aren’t used to hearing that from the social sector!

Now that we believe we’ve really begun to solve the problem of making the text in books accessible for the 1% of the population with a severe print-related disability, we’re busy thinking about the next frontier. We just won a $5 million competition that will fund our DIAGRAM R&D center to tackle the problem of image accessibility for people with print disabilities. And we’re busy discussing with educators and publishers how we can bring Bookshare-style accessible content to the ten times as many students who could benefit from talking books but don’t qualify under the very limited copyright exemption.

Human Rights Program – Changing the Field of Human Rights

Making the truth matter is the core theme of our human rights work. If we’re going to speak truth to power, then we need to make sure that we are speaking truth. Overstated claims hurt the cause of the human rights movement over the long term. The way that we can best honor the victims of past human rights violations is to document and share their stories in support of the campaign to drive change today—by seeking reforms, ending impunity and if at all possible, securing justice.

Our human rights team is active all over the world. The head of our group, Patrick Ball, is spending most of this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, working with the United Nations on a range of human rights issues (of which the DRC has many). One of our team just testified regarding evidence in the disappearance of a prominent human rights activist more than twenty years ago: the trial is one result of our extensive work at the Guatemalan National Police Archive. The human rights team trains groups how to use their number one asset, information about human rights violations, as a strategic tool to advance their social justice mission. Working with groups that range from front-line activists to truth commissions and war crimes tribunals, we’re using databases, data security and statistical analyses to realize positive change. Our team is helping activists and organizations worldwide ensure that the truth matters.

Miradi – Expanding Throughout the World

I’ve been amazed by the growth in adoption of Miradi, our conservation project management software tool. We’re helping the environmental movement become more effective through using Miradi to manage its conservation projects and to better steward environmental assets. In the last couple of years our biggest users—the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Rare and the National Audubon Society—have funded 100% of Miradi’s development costs by tapping core funds and seeking grants for Miradi from foundations, most notably the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. It is a great testament to the strength of support for Miradi in the environmental sector.

We now have more than 3,500 users in over 140 countries using Miradi for projects as varied as a coordinated national strategy for the preservation of the chimpanzees in Tanzania, to the development of management plans for two Marine National parks bordering Sweden and Norway.

Benetech’s Powerful Management Team

I’m thrilled to announce a key addition to Benetech’s senior management team. Gerardo Capiel is our new Vice President of Engineering, with a strong background as a successful entrepreneur and Internet developer. Our board and management team are working on a new strategic plan right now: the plan is not a detailed prescription for our future, but a powerful statement of our values and direction, preparing us for what’s next.

Conclusion

Benetech has become an engine of sustainable social change: we’ve figured out how to use our technology social enterprise model repeatedly to scale new ideas that deliver far greater social impact at the same or lower cost than status quo solutions can offer. We believe that the world needs more Benetech-style social enterprises, and we’re dedicated to doing more ourselves and to helping other social entrepreneurs succeed with their new ventures.

To accomplish this goal within Benetech, we need more risk-taking capital. We need innovation money that represents probably less than 5% of our budget, but is essential to our future. If we have ten hot innovative ideas, then we need to invest in figuring out which idea makes the most sense, and then to take that idea to sustainability. Benetech’s board and I are starting a new campaign to invite visionary donors to get behind the next generation of innovative Benetech social ventures.

Literacy, human rights and the environment are critically important to the future of humanity. Every day, we at Benetech see new opportunities to help more people and organizations do more with information. With your help, we will!

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
Email: president@benetech.org

Day at University of Washington

2011-05-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series

Sad News from Bookshare

2011-04-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

We had a Bookshare all-hands meeting this week, where our entire team gets together and talks about the latest activities and news about the Bookshare project. One piece of news struck me as being particularly poignant.

Melanie Sorensen, who had recently joined the Bookshare Advisory Board, suddenly passed away last month. She missed what was supposed to be her first in-person board meeting because she had the flu. It turned out to be H1N1, and its impact was devastating, as recounted in the Whittier Daily News article: Whittier College student dies from H1N1 complications.

I was especially surprised at the prominence Bookshare had in Melanie's life, by what her family chose to share with the newspaper.

Her love of reading led to a position on the board of directors of Bookshare, an organization making accessible books and periodicals for readers with vision disabilities.

"Members are allowed to download 100 books a month," Joi Sorensen explained, "but Mel had to call for a dispensation several times because she went over the limit."

On Bookshare's radar, they invited Melanie Sorensen to represent readers on the board.

"She was supposed to go to Palo Alto this year to meet other board members in person," Joi Sorensen said.

Other meetings had been via teleconference.

"Mel never felt different from anyone else," said her mom. "She just used a different way to see."

I know that all of the Bookshare community will join me in extending our condolences to Melanie's family for the loss of this outstanding young woman, role model and lover of reading.

Skoll Awards Reception

2011-04-15T18:29:00.001-07:00

Skoll Awards Reception, a photo by Skoll World Forum on Flickr.

I'm talking with Quratul Ain Bakhteari at the Skoll World Forum about the incredibly difficult work she does in Pakistan.

More on Using Crowdsourced Data to Find Big Picture Patterns (Take 3)

2011-04-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to commenter Differance bringing up in response to to our last post on this topic that made me want to take a new tack. You're absolutely right that information quality comes from people and that data's fitness for a particular purpose is very contextual. To continue in this direction, let’s look at how people use this information.

The people who are in most need of information about humanitarian disasters are the organized responders. [Commenter Iraqi Bootleg might have some very helpful ideas/examples here.] They are especially in need of big picture information that will help guide their response to do the most good with the resources employed. Civil authorities, humanitarian organizations, military units with a humanitarian mission, all hopefully have well-trained and experienced professionals in positions to make these critically important decisions. Let’s call our example professional Captain Lopez.

Successful approach to crowdsourcing data: Captain Lopez’ team gathers information from every source imaginable. Maps, helicopter overflights, satellite imagery, field reports from first responders, as well as phone calls and SMS messages from the general public. Captain Lopez helps her team assess the quality, quantity and usefulness of these different streams, each of which plays a part of the picture of the situation. SMS messages asking for help are bona fide requests, and help fill in information not otherwise available. Captain Lopez would probably rather have information from 911 calls, with trained operators following a carefully crafted protocol to extract the most crucial information, but the 911 system is swamped. So, SMS messages provide less valuable information, but their value is providing information that may not otherwise be available. And of course, in a less developed country, there unlikely to be a well-functioning 911 system: SMS may be the best way of signaling a specific need. Captain Lopez is a sophisticated user of information, and can direct her team appropriately. Success!

Unsuccessful approach to crowdsourcing data (on a map): Captain Lopez’ political boss turns down her urgent request to use a helicopter to make a survey of the building damage patterns. Why? Because the crisis-map of SMS messages is the “most comprehensive map” of the disaster we have (a quote from a senior agency head used in a recent Ushahidi presentation) and “SMS mapping has been shown to be predictive of building damage” and “it’s so much darn cheaper.” These last two are manufactured quotes, but based on the claims in the original post to which we’re responding. So, Captain Lopez ends up using the crisis-map in real-time to guide her team, and happens to miss the area of worst damage because of any number of real world reasons (inoperative cell towers comes to mind). It takes an extra six hours for the real picture to come through, and that delay has real impact. The helicopter survey is a more expensive, but more effective tool for getting the big picture. Failure!

I hope that this underscores the seriousness of this issue and makes it more tangible. We’re not having a purely academic/technical debate: rapid humanitarian response in a disaster saves lives. Delay costs lives.

As a thought experiment, imagine this approach being used in the Japan tsunami. How plausible would be to put SMS messages on a map and point to it, and say, there’s where the most severe damage is? There would be giant spots without little or no SMS traffic: the towns that were most severely affected. Using SMS for its purported predictive capabilities would likely to have been a second disaster. But, using it for what it is: real specific instances of needs would have been fine as part of a comprehensive assessment using all channels of information.

When claims of the “comprehensive” and “predictive” nature of a new tool is made, it’s naïve to expect that some people won’t leap to the conclusion that the tool should be expected to be comprehensive and predictive. And when it’s not, or when it’s less good than today’s standard of practice, people who make decisions believing that it is predictive or comprehensive will be in real danger of failing to meet their obligations to the people they serve. We need people to see SMS crowdsourcing through the successful application scenario above (and others like it), while being cautious to avoid the mistakes that stem from the second scenario.

As technologists working in highly important areas, it’s crucial we get this right.

Skoll World Forum Social Entrepreneur's Song

2011-04-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

One of the great memories I have of last week's Skoll World Forum is Willy Foote of Root Capital kicking off the Skoll Convening (the grantee meeting just before the Forum) with this ash-cloud inspired song:

“Floating in this Cloud”
How can I scale the impact of my work?
Should I partner or go it alone?
How many funders do I really need?
And how many miles have I flown?

Yes, and does it make sense, to hire a COO
Given how much this outfit has grown.

The answers, for now, are floating in this cloud
The answers are floating in this cloud

How can I find the kind of hires that I need
Before we all just explode?
How can I build a strong culture for us all
Before we burn out from overload?

Yes and how many times must I change my strategy
Before I get on a steady road

The answers, for now, are floating in this cloud
The answers are floating in this cloud
(Repeat)

And when will I know my work has been done
That the impact will forever be
How will I measure my mark on the world
That it not be just part of marketing

Yes and can I admit that my metrics were wrong
And if not, can I distract you with this song

The answers, for now, are floating in this cloud
The answers are floating in this cloud
(Repeat)

To the tune of Blowin' in the Wind
Lyrics credit: Willy Foote and Laura Vais

Channeling the real world challenges of social entrepreneurs!

Incredibly Important Opening at Benetech

2011-04-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

We're looking for someone great to take on a crucial new position at Benetech, Vice President, Fund Raising. Benetech has been expanding its impact rapidly over the last few years, and we need a dynamic executive to join our senior leadership team.

Benetech gets the majority of its funding from revenues: from product and services sales paid for by our users (or third-party payers who buy our services for our users). The remainder of our funding comes from grants and donations. But, that remainder is incredibly important. That's our rocket fuel: how we grow our impact by another integer factor and get new ventures started.

I need a senior partner to help me, our team and our board raise Benetech's profile, communicate our key messages and secure crucial resources. There are exciting new projects we could be launching today if we had more of this kind of risk capital.

So, if you know someone highly capable, who would be energized by the challenge, send them our way. A cover letter that articulates why this person wants to work for Benetech in this role and a resume is all we need.

More detailed instructions are on our Employment Opportunities web page.

Issues with Crowdsourced Data Part 2

2011-03-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

A recent guest Beneblog explains why we believe a correlation found between SMS text messages and building damage by researchers was not useful. Some of the questions we received made us realize we need to be clearer about why this is important. Why did we bother analyzing this claim? Why does it matter? Thanks to Patrick Ball, Jeff Klingner and Kristian Lum for contributing this material (and making it much clearer).

We’re reacting to the following claim: “Data collected using unbounded crowdsourcing (non-representative sampling) largely in the form of SMS from the disaster affected population in Port-au-Prince can predict, with surprisingly high accuracy and statistical significance, the location and extent of structural damage post-earthquake.”

While this claim is technically correct, it misses the point. If decision makers simply had a map, they could have made better decisions more quickly, more accurately, and with less complication than if they had tried to use crowdsourcing. Our concern is that if in the future decision makers depend on crowdsourcing, bad decisions are likely to result -- decisions that impact lives. So, we’re speaking up.

In the comments to our last post, Jon from Ushahidi said "If a tool's fitness cannot be absolute, then neither can it's fallibility." And, that the correlation they found was useful. Why is this something worth arguing about?

Misunderstanding relationships in data is a problem because it can lead to choosing less effective, more expensive data instead of choosing obvious, more accurate starting points. The correlation found in Haiti is an example of a "confounding factor". A correlation was found between building damage and SMS streams, but only because both were correlated with the simple existence of buildings. Thus the correlation between the SMS feed and the building damage is an artifact or spurious correlation. Here are two other examples of confounding effects.

- Children's reading skill is strongly correlated with their shoe size -- because older kids have bigger feet and tend to read better. You wouldn't measure all the shoes in a classroom to evaluate the kids' reading ability.

- Locations with high rates of drowning deaths are correlated with locations with high rates of ice cream sales because people tend to eat ice cream and swim when they're at leisure in hot places with water, like swimming pools and seasides. If we care about preventing drowning deaths, we don't set up a system to monitor ice cream vendors.

We're particularly concerned because we think that using a SMS stream to measure a pattern is probably at its best in a disaster situation. When there's a catastrophe, people often pull together and help each other. If an SMS stream was ever going to work as a pattern measure, it was going to be in a context like this -- and it didn't work very well. We don't think that SMS was a very good measure of building damage, relative to the obvious alternative of using a map of building locations.

The problems will be much worse if SMS streams are used to try to measure public violence. In these contexts, the perpetrators will be actively trying to suppress reporting, and so the SMS streams will not just measure where the cell phones are, they'll measure where the cell phones that perpetrators can't suppress are. We'll have many more "false negative" zones where there seems to be no violence, but there's simply no SMS traffic. And we'll have dense, highly duplicated reports of visible events where there are many observers and little attempt to suppress texting.

In the measurement of building damage in Port-au-Prince, there were several zones where there was lots of damage but few or no SMS messages ("false negatives"). This occurred when no one was trying to stop people from texting. The data will be far more misleading when the phenomenon being measured is violence.

As we've said in each post, crowdsourcing generally and SMS traffic in particular is great for documenting specific requests for help. Our critique is that it's not a good way to generate a valid basis for understanding patterns.

Crowdsourced data is not a substitute for real statistics

2011-03-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

Guest Beneblog by Patrick Ball, Jeff Klingner, and Kristian Lum

After the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi organized a centralized text messaging system to allow people to inform others about people trapped under damaged buildings and other humanitarian crises. This system was extremely effective at communicating specific needs in a timely way that required very little additional infrastructure. We think that this is important and valuable. However, we worry that crowdsourced data are not a good data source for doing statistics or finding patterns.

An analysis team from European Commission's Joint Research Center analyzed the text messages gathered through Ushahidi together with data on damaged buildings collected by the World Bank and the UN from satellite images. Then they used spatial statistical techniques to show that the pattern of aggregated text messages predicted where the damaged buildings were concentrated.

Ushahidi member Patrick Meier interpreted the JRC results as suggesting that "unbounded crowdsourcing (non-representative sampling) largely in the form of SMS from the disaster affected population in Port-au-Prince can predict, with surprisingly high accuracy and statistical significance, the location and extent of structural damage post-earthquake."

One problem with this conclusion is that there are important areas of building damage where very few text messages were recorded, such as the neighborhood of Saint Antoine, east of the National Palace. But even the overall statistical correlation of text messages and building damage is not useful, because the text messages are really just reflecting the underlying building density.

Benetech statistical consultant Dr. Kristian Lum has analyzed data from the same sources that the JRC team used. She found that after controlling for the prior existence of buildings in a particular location, the text message stream adds little to no useful information to the prediction of patterns of damaged building locations. This is not surprising, as most of the text messages in this data set were requests for food, water, or medical help, rather than reports of damage.

In fact, once you control for the presence of any buildings (damaged or undamaged), the text message stream seems to have a weak negative correlation with the presence of damaged buildings. That is, the presence of text messages suggests there are fewer (not more) damaged buildings in a particular area. It may be that people move away from damaged buildings (perhaps to places where humanitarian assistance is being given) before texting.

Here's the bottom line: if you have a map of buildings from before the earthquake, you already know more about the likely location of damaged buildings than if you relied on an SMS stream, based on the Haiti data presented. That is, to find the most damaged buildings, you should go to where there are the most buildings! The text message stream doesn't help the decision process. Indeed, it would seem to be slightly more likely to lead you to areas that have fewer damaged buildings. Crowd-sourcing has many valuable uses in a crisis, but identifying spatial patterns of damaged buildings isn't one of them.

Exciting open access project in Vancouver!

2011-03-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

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. Their largest project is Open Journal Systems, software for running a scholarly journal. It takes an editor through the entire process of operating and publishing a journal, with a heavy emphasis on open access journals (where the articles are freely available to everybody from the moment they are published).

Amazingly enough, more than 8500 journals are published with OJS, with institutions mainly running their own servers. An exciting development is the recent offering of hosting services (through the help of PKP's main partner university, Simon Fraser U. of Vancouver), so that a new journal can be launched without even needing its own home server. 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!

One metric that made a real impression: OJS users publish an open access article for around $200 per article, which compares to the typical number of $3000 that is frequently floated around in the open access field.

I had the privilege of getting in-depth demonstrations of OJS and some of the other open source software built by PKP. It was great to see another social enterprise successfully meeting the needs of a community!

Conservation Planners Use Benetech's Miradi Software to Help Save Reefs in Guam

2011-02-20T16:20:00.000-08:00

Elaina Todd, an environmental planner who develops social marketing campaigns with the nonprofit conservation group Rare, is profiled in our most recent case study for Benetech’s Miradi software. Miradi, is used by nature conservation practitioners around the world to design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects. The free and open source software, which is a joint venture between Benetech and the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP), guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation.

Elaina is using Miradi to develop and monitor her “Pride” campaign which addresses the social and economic factors that create environmental threats to Guam’s coral reefs. Rare’s Pride campaigns are two-year marketing initiatives that shift the attitudes and behaviors of people living near endangered areas to engage them in conservation efforts. Rare has embedded core Miradi functions into their standardized marketing methodology which is used to design conservation campaigns in 50 countries. Rare, which is based in Arlington, Virginia, uses Miradi in all its worldwide campaigns to promote biodiversity and has translated the Miradi software into Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin and Spanish.

Elaina learned how to use Miradi while working on a Guam watershed plan with CMP member The Nature Conservancy. Now she’s a Special Project Coordinator for the Guam Bureau of Statistics and Plans Guam Coastal Management Program where she uses Miradi to prioritize threats to Guam ecosystems. Miradi helped Elaina determine that sedimentation due to wildfires is the main threat to reefs in Guam’s Sella Bay and Cetti Bay. The software’s diagram component, results chains, conceptual models and threat ratings allowed her to carefully analyze the impact of wildfires on sedimentation and water quality in these areas.

Once Elaina identified the primary threat to the reefs, Miradi helped Elaina to create a campaign project plan for Guam that aimed to increase the percentage of branching coral species by reducing the number of fires on the island. The campaign, which is currently underway, protects coral reefs in Southern Guam by influencing local communities to prevent and report wildland fires in order to reduce harmful sedimentation.

“We can identify threats and priorities and write a management plan with threat rankings that gives us the ability to say where the funding should be focused on first,” Elaina told us. “By using the concept models for the watershed plan, we can be comprehensive and see what other projects we should be engaged in and other organizations that should be involved.”

Elaina says that Miradi helped her determine what knowledge was needed by local residents to adopt behaviors that promote clean water. In addition to teaching the community how wildfires contribute to water pollution, Elaina concluded that hunters on Guam should also be shown how to use bait to attract deer instead of relying on fires to flush them out. Miradi’s threat ranking and results chains illustrated how reducing fires set by hunters - and encouraging the community to report these blazes - would help decrease sedimentation and improve water quality. Elaina also proposed the introduction of a hotline for community members to report fire violations and a fire violation citations program.

According to Elaina, halting fires and sedimentation on the reefs is especially critical because the U.S. military plans to move 9,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam in the next five years and the island’s population is expected to increase by 30%. Given the time pressure, Elaina uses Miradi to develop strategies that can be monitored for effectiveness. She says that one of the most important benefits of Miradi is that it allows environmental planners to make the best use of limited resources. “Sometimes we are so spread thin, that focusing in on one factor chain or one target or one threat or one strategy is so useful to us,” she says. “We don’t focus on threats where the solutions are not effective and we make the best use of time, resources and energy.”

Elaina says that she will know that the campaign is having an impact when there is increased discussion about hunters and wildfire prevention and the reduction of arson-induced wildfires, devegetation of watersheds and sedimentation. Her campaign is seeking a 50% reduction in illegal fires or arson by this year and a 10% reduction in watershed sedimentation by 2012. To reach these goals, Elaina’s plan advocates planting at least 20,000 seedlings over 18 acres in the Piti and Asan watershed area and the creation of community watershed monitoring groups.

In addition to identifying environmental threats and solutions, Elaina says Miradi helped her determine that people in the north end of Guam were more focused on dump sites than watershed issues. She says this information helped her target her campaign to 50,000 people in the South region of Guam instead of the 175,000 people on the entire island. “The entire focus of our social message is to know your audience,” Elaina told us. “Knowing the areas where we are going to work allows us to be much more specialized and not waste time working in an area where our message will not be as effective. We have a limited amount of resources and being strategic and focused in the planning allows you to be much more effective.”

Benetech Statistician Megan Price talks to local ASA chapter

2011-02-04T17:05:00.000-08:00

Guest Beneblog by Megan Price

I recently had the opportunity to present several of HRP’s projects to the local San Francisco chapter of the American Statistical Association (SFASA). Despite an audience of fellow statisticians, I chose to focus my talk more on the research questions and challenges posed by our work in human rights and less on the nuts and bolts of our statistical methods (though I did include a few equations and Greek letters!).

Specifically, I presented the audience with the following questions:

Were acts of genocide committed against the Mayan people in Guatemala?
How many Kosovars were killed between March and June 1999?
How much did Hissene Habré know about political killings during his presidency?
Did high-ranking officials within the Guatemalan National Police know about Edgar Fernando García’s disappearance?

As I told the audience, for those who like to skip to the last page of novels, the answers are 1) yes, 2) approximately 10,000, 3) a lot, and 4) we’re not sure. For details on how we arrived at these answers, you can find a copy of my presentation on the SFASA webpage.

The audience was a diverse group of statisticians, and the Q&A featured lively discussion. In particular, we commiserated over the challenge of presenting statistical results as an expert witness and wondered if perhaps a version of the Daubert Standard could be created specifically for statistical analyses. There was much excitement and interest in recruiting Stephen Pierson, the American Statistical Association’s Director of Science Policy, to consider such an initiative.

In general the local chapter members were very excited about, and more than a little envious of, our work and the potential it has to impact human rights research. Quite a few are hoping to volunteer for us in the future!

Liz Halperin's Dream

2011-01-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from the incredible Liz Halperin. She's one of our Bookshare team members and also happens to be deaf and blind. She shoots me me very interesting ideas frequently, and I thought I'd share this one with my blog readers. I can't quite figure out how to make it, but I bet someone will!!

Hi Jim, Busy, busy man. But I'm intruding because you are "intrude-able" and I have a dream. Like all good science fiction, it starts as a dream, and then somehow becomes real. You have blogged about various funders looking for those "great leaps of imagination", that if created, could make a huge benefit to people.

My idea has likely been floated already, I have no idea. But it's tech-time sci fi.

I imagine I have a small, lightweight box or sphere or flat case like a woman's cosmetic compact in my rear jeans/slacks pocket , purse/briefcase or backpack. I stand in front of a building and pull out the item, and push a button on it or give a verbal command or a method from my wheelchair. The unit opens out to be a hologram. I can give commands (as above) for different levels of info. General layout down to exact placements of empty chairs in an office, or location of receptionist at his desk. Finding the front door, the elevator. If I'm deaf-blind, being able to physically feel the potted plants between the door and elevator. If I use a wheelchair, being able to see in advance if a restroom will be accessible. The hologram not to be just vision: but able for people to feel items, or have stuff spoken to them. Ability to program it for individual needs (me to manually feel, vs. Scott Rains to see vs. Rob Turner to have it read aloud, or converted to braille, and so on) [Note from Jim: Scott Rains is a wheelchair user and Rob Turner is blind, both on our team here at Bookshare]. I could scope out my street for X number of blocks. Discover *in advance* that 36th is closed to pedestrians on south side due to construction. (A biggie for me.) When done, the whole thing collapses back into its mini-shape. This is GPS to an exponential level. It would be immediately updated when turned on, via some sort of satellite or other new tech for indoors. I could stop outside my aunt's house and find which furniture has been moved where. Could help soooo many people, including the senior/geriatric set.

Big dream. High tech. "Out there." But why not???? Maybe you can pass this idea off to someone who likes the headgame and might even pitch it to one of those funders….

Lawsuit over denying access to a student with learning disabilities

2011-01-29T18:22:00.000-08:00

We're really proud of the rapid growth of our Bookshare online library for people with print disabilities. We're up to more than 125,000 users, with over 95,000 books available, and our users are now accessing content at a rate of more than million downloads per year!

That's why it's painful to hear about disputes over denying students with very real print disabilities access to these resources. I've recently been corresponding with a mother whose son's school district seems to be suing them to deny access to accessible material. She asked me to comment on a bunch of issues around Bookshare, and we prepared the comments below. I'm really hoping more information will help resolve these kinds of disputes: I'm often surprised at the things I hear from the field.

Statement on Bookshare
January 24, 2011

Response to Request for Information
Benetech, the nonprofit parent of the Bookshare online library for people with print disabilities, is responding to a request to answer specific questions on how Bookshare operates. Rather than discussing private information about our users, we will answer these questions with information on how Bookshare operates and what typical schools and users would see at different times in using Bookshare.

Background Information
Benetech is Silicon Valley’s deliberately nonprofit technology company. We look for social applications of IT that will make a major impact on social sector activities. We’ve already made a huge difference in the area of software for students with disabilities and for human rights and environmental organizations. We have IRS recognition as a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organization. Our largest single funder is the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education, which contracts with Benetech at the level of $6.5 million per year to provide accessible book services to students with qualifying print disabilities nationwide. Bookshare currently serves more than 120,000 students with disabilities, and has more than 95,000 accessible books. Our social goal is that all students with disabilities which prevent them from effectively using a printed book, have the opportunity to read the same titles as students without disabilities, through the use of assistive technology and Bookshare digital books. The most typical means of accessibility is to use software that reads the digital text aloud in a computer-synthesized voice.

The legal framework for Bookshare is the Section 121 copyright exception in federal copyright law: all Bookshare users must have a disability that qualifies under that section. In addition, students who receive textbooks that originate from the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center must meet additional requirements, most notably that they have an IEP and are covered by IDEA.

1. What is the school signup process for Bookshare?

Bookshare services are freely available to any school in the U.S. serving students with print disabilities. Organizations need to do the following to begin downloading copyrighted content (public domain content is free for all visitors to the Bookshare website):
• Create an online account with basic information about their school or district, listing a Primary Contact responsible for the account
• Add one or more students who qualify, including name, grade level, disability status, IEP status (yes/no), and names/emails of additional staff authorized to download copyrighted information (we call them sponsors)
• Agree to a plain language organizational agreement that commits the school to following the laws around who qualifies and restricts the provision of copyrighted material to only students that qualify

While almost everything around Bookshare signup and activities is done online, we must receive a signed copy of the organizational agreement (attached to this statement) either by postal mail or by fax. The signup process explains each of these required steps. In addition, the school’s primary contact would be reminded of this information by email as well.

2. What happens when a registered organization attempts to download books or requests books before the organizational agreement is signed?

If an organization has not yet returned the signed organizational agreement, instead of download links on the book page, the staff person for the organization will see this message: “The primary contact of your organization must sign and return the organizational agreement to finish registration. This form is available at the Bookshare Help tab.”

3. If specific NIMAS textbooks are available through the Bookshare catalog, can organizational sponsors (Bookshare’s term for staff people authorized by a school to download content) in New Jersey download them directly from Bookshare, or do they first need to go through the state accessible instructional material coordinator?

Textbooks that have been previously requested by other schools or state education agencies are available for download by any K-12 sponsor for students with IEPs (to meet the legal requirements of the IDEA law that established the NIMAC).
If the specific textbook is in the NIMAC, but not yet in the Bookshare library, an authorized user of the NIMAC must request for that textbook be assigned to Bookshare to be converted into a student-ready file. More than half of U.S. states have designated Bookshare as an authorized user for those states, and so Bookshare can simply take care of all such requests from K-12 staff in those states. New Jersey is not such a state, and thus Bookshare would need to wait to be assigned titles by an authorized user of the NIMAC for the state of New Jersey, typically a responsible person at the state education agency. Perkie Cannon is currently listed as the state’s NIMAS/NIMAC coordinator at the CAST website: generally we would point schools to the person with this responsibility to learn more about that state’s process for assigning NIMAC books to be converted.

4. If a member has trouble opening a Bookshare file, or cannot get the file to function properly, what kind of response or advice might they get from technical support? Would it be unusual for Bookshare technical support staff to advise a member to continue to download the same book multiple times, in the absence of any other directive or suggestions, in an attempt to get it to work?

Bookshare’s response will vary with each situation. Generally, support staff will ask the member or sponsor if they are seeing any error messages and which steps they took that produced the error. If Bookshare staff is unable to reproduce the error internally, we may ask the member to perform the download again and let us know if they continue to experience the problem.

5. What school districts in Mercer and Middlesex County, NJ have a Bookshare membership?
Unfortunately, we can’t share specific school district data as it is confidential. We can share that we have multiple K-12 organizations using Bookshare in those counties, as far as we understand the results of a search for those areas in our organization database. In New Jersey alone:
• 5400 K-12 students are signed up for Bookshare services
• We’re serving roughly 500 K-12 school organizations, which includes both school districts and schools
• The majority of K-12 students that we serve are students with learning disabilities, severe enough to meet the qualifications of Section 121
• All students with (such a) LD classification and an IEP are eligible to have NIMAC-sourced textbooks downloaded for them by their school or LEA

6. What is your typical response time to a school contact? How often, or what percent of the time would you estimate that it takes two weeks to respond to a school contact?

It is Bookshare’s goal to respond to support inquiries within two business days, and we meet or exceed this goal in most cases. In rare cases, some responses may be delayed due to the need for additional information and other factors that change with each situation, but we strive to keep these delays minimal.

7. Are NIMAC-sourced textbooks only for the blind?

The majority of students served by Bookshare, the largest user of the NIMAC, are not blind. Under IDEA 2004, the students that are eligible to receive textbooks obtained through the NIMAC must be doubly qualified: they must have an IEP and a disability that qualifies under the Section 121 copyright exception. Students do not have to be blind to have an IEP: it’s simple to demonstrate that from statistics widely published by the Department of Education (the blind and visually impaired are a very small fraction of students with IEPs). Students do not have to be blind to qualify under the copyright exception. Bookshare and RFB&D, the two largest agencies the serve students exclusively who qualify under Section 121, both have more than 70% of their members as those with learning disabilities. Of course, since the Department of Education is the largest single funder of Bookshare and RFB&D, our policies for how to serve students (and which students qualify under IDEA for NIMAC-sourced content) have received extensive legal review by the Department’s attorneys.

8. Does Bookshare work with the Kurzweil products for students with learning disabilities?

Bookshare works with all developers of access products that support our users with qualifying disabilities. The Kurzweil 3000 product is one of the leading commercial products used by our users with learning disabilities. As a point of fact, the Kurzweil 3000 allows Bookshare users to search for Bookshare books, download them, and read them without ever leaving the Kurzweil 3000 software program.

Brainstorm in Providence with a side of Serendipity

2011-01-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

I occasionally get invited to small group brainstorms of key leaders in fields where we’re active (and we’re active in a lot of fields!). I’m on the plane home from one such weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, held at Brown University. The Think Different Summit was 15-20 smart people, led by an experienced facilitator, trying to imagine the future of the learning disability rights movement.

The outcomes of the brainstorm aren’t for me to share, although I look forward to tweeting/blogging as some of these results hit the web. But, I can share the excitement of being part of this process and some of the things I learned.

For one thing, it was the first meeting with a major presence of adults with avowed learning disabilities. Of course, with the prevalence of people with learning disabilities in the population being one in four or five, they’ve been part of probably every meeting I’ve ever been to! But, these leaders were “out” about their disability.

And so, the first insight for me was the role of adults with learning disabilities in their own rights struggle. I would not expect the parents of blind children to drive the rights struggle for blind people, but I had taken the role of parents as the prime movers in the LD movement for given. Part of this is that LD was much less diagnosed in my generation, but now we have quite a number of people in their 20s and 30s who have known that they are people with learning disabilities from a young age. I’m sure part of the issue is that society strongly encourages people with LD to stay in the closet about their disability. But, the increased leadership of people with LD in their own movement seems a given. Of course, it’s pretty clear given heredity that many parent leaders in this effort have LD too!!

Over the weekend, I received email from a parent who is will be in court next month, fighting an attempt by her son’s school district to remove his access to textbooks through Bookshare (he won’t lose access to Bookshare itself, just the couple of thousand K-12 textbooks that we have where the school is the gatekeeper). I was able to share her predicament with the people there, and the chair of one of the organizations present jumped to offer his assistance to this parent, since he had worked on LD advocacy in her very state.

The need to requalify for dyslexia services over and over again at great expense (thousands of dollars each time) to get accommodations in school and for testing came across as a huge problem. At Bookshare, we don’t think that people with LD get “cured,” because that's not our understanding of the science. We don’t require people to qualify again once we’ve received the initial certification of a qualifying disability. We’re dealing with people with severe disabilities that stop them from reading a print book effectively. This won’t go away. But, the great expense involved in qualifying puts advanced educational opportunity beyond the means of most families with a child with learning disabilities. This seems to be an even bigger problem than I recognized.

Another welcome opportunity was the chance to talk informally with some of the top leaders in our field, including Jim Wendorf of NCLD and Andrew Friedman of RFB&D, who are both on the federal commission on accessible materials for post-secondary students.

Although the topic was on learning disabilities, one of the funders present had a strong interest in environmental ideas. Right now I’m spending more time on a new project concept at Benetech around helping local government address practical issues around climate change. I received a handful of people we should be talking to, and strong feedback on different aspect of our ideas.

We are strong believers in the power of serendipity: the idea that great things happen when you get together with interesting people that were in no way anticipated! This weekend just reconfirms that for me: most of these exciting outcomes weren’t anticipated by me: and I’m not even discussing the central topics of the event!!

Russia rights groups get help from Microsoft

2011-01-04T05:33:00.000-08:00

Patrick Ball and I have often discussed the risks to social justice groups from using unlicensed proprietary software. A government could suppress a group using "piracy" as a reason, rather than criticism of the government. We've seen this happen in places like Russia.

That's why it's heartening to read an article like this in the Christian Science Monitor, Russia rights groups get help from unlikely champion: Microsoft. It doesn't help Microsoft to be associated with suppression of environmental and human rights groups, and it's great to see them do the right thing!

Benetech Truths

2011-01-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Benetech has spent a good part of this last year thinking about what's next for our mission and our team. A crucial part of that effort has been to identify what we think is uniquely true about Benetech. This portion was an internally focused effort based on conversations with our team. We came up with the following truths as part of that process. You might call them Benetech's values, but we didn't look at traditional organizational value statements while drafting these truths. Writing them down has been powerful for us: these truths articulate who we are and how we do things at Benetech. We're striving now to fully live up to them!

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.

2 We get stuff done.

Benetech has a record of success in securing funding, creating partnerships, and delivering products and services that are useful tools for the social sector. Our users are the primary drivers of our technology development. We honor our commitments to all our stakeholders. Our work has significant impact on users, partners, and the fields of social enterprise, human rights, disability and the environment.

3 We do the right stuff right.

We solve social problems that otherwise would not be solved. We are a nonprofit technology company serving the unserved, tackling important challenges that the private sector cannot by developing content, products and services to effect social change. We value professionalism, dedication and service. We seek to evaluate our people and our work, and to continue to document and improve our procedures.

4 We prefer open to proprietary (internal and external).

Benetech seeks to be open internally and externally. While respecting individual privacy and our other values, we foster a collaborative work environment through open communication. We rely on open source tools for information exchange and development tools, as appropriate. Externally, Benetech is committed to open standards in software to ensure others are able to learn from and contribute to our work.

5 We think we can do more together (internally and externally).

Benetech works in partnerships. We value modesty and show humility and respect for users, community members, funders, opinion leaders and organizational partners. We avoid competing with our partner organizations. With extensive feedback from users, we ensure our projects truly make a difference, helping to amplify the impact of our partner’s work. Benetech’s partnerships in literacy, human rights and environmental conservation are matching the creativity of the high-tech sector with the efforts of grassroots leaders around the world.

6 We value flexibility (as an employer and from our employees).

Flexibility is an asset to Benetech’s accomplishments and to its ability to attract and retain excellent staff members. We seek to establish workplace flexibility that enables greater effectiveness without sacrificing teamwork and spirit. Benetech is committed to communication and cooperation with employees, whether physically present or not.

7 We are committed to personal and professional development.

Benetech’s success at effecting social change stems in large part from its excellent staff. Benetech seeks to create leaders by fostering personal learning, growth and service. We want to expose all of our team to our technology and our customers. Benetech seeks to empower its managers with knowledge, authority and responsibility, and encourages them to use their judgment and expertise. We encourage our staff to take on leadership positions within the fields we work, through activities such as external speaking engagements. These opportunities bring benefits not only to Benetech but to the broader community.

With regard to professional development, Benetech’s depth of knowledge and diverse program activities offer great opportunities for cross-learning in the workplace and in the field. These include formal and informal activities such as individual training by other staff members, workshops, staff brown bags and visiting speakers. Benetech assists employees with courses, degree programs and other relevant learning experiences. Benetech seeks to nurture and celebrate staff and organizational accomplishments.

Bookshare Creates Opportunities For Gifted Students

2010-12-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

I talk a lot about how technology can help create tremendous educational opportunities for students with print disabilities. As part of my holiday greetings this year, I would like to introduce you to two young people who have used Benetech’s Bookshare library to reach academic excellence and find the books that keep them engaged in their off hours.

Steffon Middleton and Jessica Pinto have both mastered the art of searching and downloading Bookshare’s accessible texts. Steffon, who attends Gadsden Community College in Gadsden, Alabama is a straight-A student who has made his college deans list each semester. He downloads Bookshare texts to a portable device called a BrailleNote that allows blind people like him to read digital Braille. Two years ago, Steffon worked with us to create a Bookshare how-to video and a video profile which also features his teacher Jill Dunaway who helped him become a Bookshare member.

Because the Bookshare collection is free to qualified U.S. students, Steffon says downloading from the collection helps him gather his required texts and recreational reading without eating into his limited funds. Steffon also points out that Bookshare texts are far more searchable than other e-books or printed Braille. He says Bookshare books also contain fewer errors that require time consuming correction from his school’s student services department.
"The Bookshare books are better-quality and very easy to navigate with a “find” command that allows you to scroll through it,” says Steffon. “They are there when I need them and I don’t have to depend on anyone. Everyone needs help in this world, but I’m not old or a cripple and I want to be on an even plane with everyone else.”

Bookshare has already been helpful to Steffon’s younger brother Devante, a Bookshare member who is now a student at Steffon’s alma matter, the Alabama School for the Blind. Steffon points out that Braille books are still difficult for blind people to acquire and he wants more readers to know about the Bookshare service. Next fall, Steffon will enter Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama where he plans to major in public relations. He plans to include his Bookshare videos in his portfolio and we hope that he will also join us as a Bookshare volunteer proofreader. You can read our full profile of Steffon here.

New Mexico high school student Jessica Pinto also depends on Bookshare’s accessible digital texts to meet top academic standards. Jessica, who is a junior at Manzano High School in Albuquerque, is a straight-A student and a member of the National Honor Society. Bookshare provides Jessica with books for her English literature class and her personal reading where her tastes run toward young adult fiction. Cerebral palsy makes it difficult for Jessica to hold a book. She gets around this by downloading Bookshare texts on her laptop, enlarging the font, and scrolling through the text with the down arrow key on her keyboard.

“Jessica has always been smart, but Bookshare gave her the books she needed to really excel,” says Jessica’s mother Mary Pinto. “Jessica is on the honor roll, has an academic letter and was voted into the National Honor Society because of Bookshare. She is learning so much because I am not having to read her books to her.”

Mary Pinto adds that no matter what kind of assistive technology a student needs to succeed, Bookshare gives students like Jessica the opportunity to make the critical transition into high school and from there to college level academics. Jessica is planning to attend college after she graduates from high school and expects to continue downloading her required college texts from Bookshare.

In addition to fueling her college ambitions, Jessica credits Bookshare with encouraging her wish to become a writer. She says she is now working on piece of fiction for teenagers about a girl’s adventures in a winter fantasyland. “Without Bookshare, reading would just become a task and it wouldn’t be fun,” says Jessica. “It depends on how much homework I have, but I try to read as much as possible. Getting these books is really important to me.”

Here is our full profile of Jessica Pinto which lists the books she is now reading. Like Steffon, Jessica also worked with Bookshare to create a how-to video and a video story about her life as an unstoppable reader. We are proud of both Jessica and Steffon and we wish them both a New Year full of good books and new accomplishments.

Happy Holidays from Bookshare!

2010-12-21T17:54:00.000-08:00

I liked what our Bookshare team did for their electronic holiday card!

Benetech Human Rights Data Analysts Uncover Critical Evidence

2010-12-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

As the worldwide debate continues about the release of government information by Wikileaks, history has shown that the uncovering of government data can be an important factor in human rights investigations. In 2010, Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) examined once hidden government documents from Guatemala and Chad that provided key evidence needed to hold former national leaders and security forces accountable for human rights violations. HRDAG analysis of this information was carried out with the support of the current governments and NGO communities in both these countries.

Discovered by chance, these police and prison records told the stories of serious human rights violations from the perspective of the perpetrators. They revealed the culpability of powerful people who never expected that these records would ever be exposed to public scrutiny - let alone scientific analysis. The past year of research by HRDAG analysts has supported key criminal prosecutions and uncovered the truth about political violence in Guatemala, Iran, Colombia, Chad and Liberia.

In conflict zones where abuses are often concealed and crimes are forgotten, the scientists of HRDAG have the tools to create truthful accounts that challenge impunity. Expert testimony from HRDAG statistician Daniel Guzmán provided critical evidence in the October 2010 conviction of two former police officers for the 1984 disappearance of Guatemalan labor leader Edgar Fernando García. Guzmán’s testimony was based on HRDAG’s analysis of the 31.7 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive which was discovered by chance in 2005.

A cache of prison records generated by a former state security force in Chad provided data for a 2010 HRDAG report about human rights violations in Chad. The HRDAG analysis shows that former Chadian president Hissène Habré was well informed of the hundreds of prison deaths that occurred during his regime. The files were discovered by Human Rights Watch at the abandoned headquarters of Habré’s security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS). They contained detailed accounts of the interrogations, movements, and deaths of prisoners, as well as information on the internal functioning of the DDS. Habré has been accused of killing and systematically torturing thousands of political opponents. Representatives from the European Union, the African Union, Chad, and other countries agreed last month to finance Habré’s trial where prosecutors may use HRDAG’s analysis to argue Habré’s responsibility for the prison deaths.

HRDAG analysis of formerly hidden data has promoted respect for human rights and raised the cost of crimes against humanity. These researchers set the worldwide standard for calculating scientifically sound statistics and quantitative findings that support human rights claims which are transparently, demonstrably, undeniably true. Their work illustrates Benetech’s mission to create technology in the service of humanity.

Breakthrough Philanthropy - Thiel Foundation event

2010-12-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

I've been asked by a lot of people both inside and outside Benetech lately to not only talk about the what we do, but the why we do it: the thinking behind it. I met with a very senior nonprofit leader last week in New York who explicitly asked us to talk more about what we're thinking. So, I hope to have more Beneblogs that give a window onto our thought processes (even when raw and not quite baked)! So, after I do my readout on what happened, I'll try to inject the way it got me thinking at the end of this post.

Last night I had the privilege of attending the Breakthough Philanthropy event put on by Peter Thiel's foundation, covered in the local press with articles like "Silicon Valley billionaire backs futuristic philanthropy" from the San Jose Mercury News.

The foundation spotlighted eight unusual nonprofit groups. I knew of a fair number of the groups already. The Santa Fe Institute is probably the best known: a research institute dedicated to studying complex problems. Benetech's chief scientist, Dr. Patrick Ball, has spent time there working on the scientific challenges of our work studying large scale human rights violations. We and Santa Fe also share a common board member: Dr. Leighton Read (founder of Aviron, the original makers of the FluMist nasal spray vaccine, author of Total Engagement, etc.). SFI had Dr. Murray Gell-Mann there, the Caltech Nobel Physics laureate, in person as well with a bobble-head doll!

Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute has been a leading proponent of the nanotechnology field (and expected revolution). I got to meet Christine when I was part of the private rocket field in the early 80s (I recently discovered the best article about my brief rocket science period online: The Wrong Stuff).

Three of the groups were loosely affiliated with Ray Kurzweil and his ideas around human uploading and the Singularity. There was a group called the Seasteading Institute: they want to experiment with new political forms by starting new countries on the high seas. The SENS Foundation wants to advance "Rejuvenation Biotechnologies." Their thesis is that we have to study the progressive development of aging to get ahead of treating pathology: sort of studying how to fix it before it's broken. And the last group is well known to tech people, the X PRIZE Foundation.

So, I was initially kind of skeptical about this eclectic group. I've not been a huge fan of Ray's somewhat dystopian ideas of the future of mankind. I also don't think the X Prize approach is applicable to most of the social challenges I see, although I loved the Ansari X Prize as driving space flight through Burt Rutan's winning entry.

The groups each had four minutes to pitch their ideas. They all had big picture goals, and some of them made explicit funding asks during their lightning presentations. These were much more effective than I expected, and even two of the three Kurzweil-inspired groups were convincing enough (Singularity U and Humanity+). Only one didn't work at all for me: Singularity Institute.

But, Peter Thiel did a good job of setting up the framing for these investments in brief final comments. He acknowledged that many of these ideas struck many in the philanthropy field as weird. But, he drew a distinction between incremental change and breakthrough change (he used the words "extensive" and "intensive"). Extensive change is going from something that works at one scale and bringing it up to a larger scale. He pointed out that it's much harder to go from zero to one, than it is to go from one to many. He's looking for those breakthrough opportunities that will have a major impact. But, that means you have to bet on a lot of unusual, "weird" ideas, to see one or two that have that kind of revolutionary impact.

There aren't many philanthropists that explicitly endorse a strategy where the majority of their grants are likely to not be successful. But, if you have a heightened appetite for risk, the frame changes. What if only one of these groups gets revolutionary change going that changes society on a big scale? Probably a pretty good return on investment. Of course, we might not know that for a decade or two or three, and any change at the scale will require far more groups helping make it happen. But, through the lens of one home run justifies all of the other efforts, it makes sense.

I see the same kind of energy present in these groups that I saw in the early days of the private rocket business in the 1980s (and to be honest, in the social entrepreneurship movement of today!). Being a rocket scientist (even though my rocket admittedly blew up) was the catalyst for me to go in a completely different career direction and helped make me into what turned into a social entrepreneur. So, even if I don't buy the Ray Kurzweil vision of the singularity happening in the next century, I can imagine that a bunch of brilliant young people excited by that vision will invent the future after going through Singularity U. As one VC put it to me after the talks, you don't have to become a Jesuit to benefit from a Jesuit education! And, if a one in ten chance of Ray's vision coming true in the next 50 years is acceptable odds, investing in guiding that transition makes a lot more sense than if your standard is certainty.

Finally, I also took away that this is not an either-or proposition from Thiel's standpoint. We need investments both in breakthrough opportunities and in scaling up great ideas that have already been proven.

Testimony From Benetech’s Daniel Guzmán Helps Establish Legal Precedent and Convictions for Forced Disappearance in Guatemala

2010-11-30T10:39:00.001-08:00

I announced in this blog last month that judges in Guatemala had found two former police officers guilty in the 1984 forced disappearance of Guatemalan student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. Expert testimony by Benetech statistical consultant Daniel Guzmán provided critical evidence in the conviction of the former Guatemalan National Police officers Abraham Lancerio Gómez and Héctor Roderico Ramírez.

Gómez and Ramírez were each sentenced to the maximum term of 40 years in prison for their role in García’s disappearance. This historical ruling has established forced disappearance as a crime in Guatemala and provided government prosecutors with a key legal precedent needed to investigate higher ranking officers for their possible role in the case. You can read more about the verdict here.

The entire staff here at Benetech is extremely proud of Daniel Guzmán and his colleagues at the Benetech Human Rights Program who have spent four years analyzing random samples of the estimated 31.7 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive. Guzmán’s testimony in the García case was based on his analysis of this archive which was discovered in a military munitions storehouse near Guatemala City in 2005. The archive includes documents generated during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict which took place from 1960 to 1996. An estimated 40,000 Guatemalans disappeared during this period of violence. While the Guatemalan National Police were disbanded after the country's 1996 Peace Accords, very few people have ever been held accountable for crimes that took place during the 36 years of violence.

Guzmán and the other statisticians, programmers, demographers and data analysts of Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) believe that scientific arguments can help clarify the past and end impunity. But in order to prosecute perpetrators of human rights violations, the courts rightly demand evidence. HRDAG analyzes the patterns and magnitude of human rights violations to determine how many of the killed and disappeared have never been accounted for - and who is most responsible.

Guzmán conducted a comparative analysis between 667 documents pertaining to García that were found in the Archive and estimates from the entire Archive. This analysis, which was submitted as evidence in the trial, showed that units responsible for the direction and coordination of the National Police were acquainted with more than 73% of the documents related to the García case as opposed to 30% of all documents in the entire Archive. Guzmán’s findings helped support arguments by prosecutors that high-level National Police officers were aware of orders given for the planning and design of operations like the one that resulted in García’s disappearance. Guzmán’s testimony also helped confirm the credibility of our Guatemalan partners who preserve and examine the documents in the archive, a group known as the National Police Archives in Guatemala (Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional) or AHPN.

The García case is the first in Guatemala based primarily on archive documents and paves the way for judges to trust these records - and statistical findings - as evidence in future trials. Prosecutors announced that Benetech’s analysis of archive contents will be a key part of future investigations. The scientific methods used by HRDAG to analyze the archive has set standards of scientific rigor that helps overcome political arguments about these records. HRDAG’s analysis establishes scientific paradigms for examining large collections of human rights data in other parts of the world.

Calculating scientifically sound statistics and quantitative findings to support human rights claims offers a powerful mechanism to help halt the cycle of violence and create lasting social change. Unless the human rights community is ready with unimpeachable information about past abuses, it cannot make the most of opportunities for official acknowledgment, accountability or reform. Twenty-six years after his disappearance, the family of Edgar Fernando García knows that this opportunity for justice has not been lost.

Signals - Stoplights for student success

2010-11-09T06:11:00.000-08:00

At the STS meeting in Kyoto, I had the pleasure of meeting France Córdova, the president of Purdue University. I took my first full pattern recognition course at Purdue long ago and far away (my brother Bill is a Boilermaker/Purdue alum, too).

France mentioned some cool education technology that had been developed at Purdue, called Signals - Stoplights for student success. Signals blends two key ideas:

The patterns of student failure can be spotted early: much earlier than existing systems relying on failing midterms! Purdue can spot patterns that indicate a much higher chance of failure, and intervene early.
Simple communications design that everybody gets: green light, yellow light, red light. And, get these signals to both students and faculty.

I was able to talk to one of the senior team at Purdue about this at the recent launch of Purdue's Silicon Valley presence. He was quite realistic about the limitations of the system. For example, a really bright student who can pull everything together just before the exams might present with a red light a third of the way into the quarter, but still be ok. But, the weight of evidence is that they can associate learning management system data with an increased likelihood of failure, and then intervene.

This really made me think about students with disabilities. Disabled Student Services offices can't supervise the students they serve: there's not enough resources for that, and college students don't need babysitting. But, a system that cost-effectively identifies any students at risk of failure is a great tool for all students, and might also serve as a flag for some of the disability services interventions that might be needed. For example, an accessible version of a key book or item of course content.

Purdue has made a deal with Sungard to support Signals more widely at other universities: I hope this kind of tool makes a much wider impact!

The Tech Awards - Technology Benefiting Humanity

2010-11-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

A Guest Beneblog by Teresa Throckmorton, Benetech's CFO

Walking into the Santa Clara Convention Center last night looked very much like so many other black tie events – but that’s where the similarity ended.

I just attended the 2010 Tech Awards Gala Event. Awards were presented in five areas: Environment, Economic Development, Education, Equality and Health. Inside there were 20 stations set up with this year’s laureates. Talking with each of these passionate and amazing individuals was fascinating. It was hard to stop talking to one – so I could move on to the next. The impacts these people and their organizations make are being felt world-wide. Using technology as a base for knowing change is possible, change is happening.

What did I learn last night? I learned that in some parts of India everyone has a cell phone but few have indoor plumbing or access to clean water – change is happening. I learned it’s now possible to give immunizations and antibiotics with a needle-free injection system; to capture a blood smear on a small device, called a CellScope, send the image over a cell phone and get a diagnosis; to generate clean electricity for lights and gas for cooking from rice husks and that it is possible to change the world.

I entered thinking Benetech was a lone voice for social change using technology. I left proud to be a part of this growing family of voices dedicated to making change.

Work on What Matters — Social Edge

2010-11-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

I'm having a conversation over at Social Edge on What Matters. Feel free to join in the conversation and share your views on the topic. Here's my kick-off post for the thread:

I was impressed when I heard Tim O'Reilly, one of the main thought leaders in information technology, recommending to all tech folks last year that they Work on Stuff that Matters. Tim's point wasn't that all tech developers should go to work for nonprofits, it was that people should step back and think about what matters to them. Life is too short to throw your professional life away on stuff you don't care about.

Like many techies, I came to work on technology because I loved doing it. We get a charge out of figuring things out, and understanding how the world works in a deep ways. Almost all the geeks I know want to do something important, something meaningful, whether exploring something new in cosmology, designing a building that could better resist an earthquake, cure a disease or design a new and faster chip.

I see this hunger for meaning in most of the people I'm privileged to meet: from the college freshman to the fresh grad to the mid-career professional and the senior executive. We all want to work on Stuff That Matters. And, the opportunities to do so have never been better.

Business as usual, done without regard to the big picture for society, hasn't worked out so well. There is a new wave of leaders who want business to both make money and do right by society and the planet. And, the same spirit of innovation for a purpose is affecting nonprofits and government as well.

If you're looking for a new job, look for a company or organization that offers the chance to work on Stuff That Matters. We need you to get engaged now, in business, government and the social sector, to build the better world we all need, and that our children and grandchildren will need.

So, how did you get to work on Stuff That Matters?
How do you make your team feel that their work Matters?
How are we going to shift expectations so that more and more organizations see their purpose as meaning through supporting larger society, not just their shareholders or their narrow product or projects?

Join Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, in a conversation about how we can make working on Stuff That Matters the rule instead of the exception!

Wikileaks War Data Reveal Underreporting of Iraqi Civilian Casualties

2010-11-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

A Guest Beneblog by Anita Gohdes, Jeff Klingner, Megan Price and Patrick Ball

The recent release of almost 400,000 secret US military files on the war in Iraq through Wikileaks has attracted wide media coverage.

These documents, officially known as the significant acts database (SIGACTS), add new insights to the ongoing debate on how many casualties have occurred in Iraq since the beginning of the war. The unofficial Iraq Body Count (IBC), which tracks civilian casualties in Iraq based on press reports and administrative records, has initiated a comparison of their own data to the deaths documented in the SIGACTS data. In a commendable effort, they are recoding the SIGACTS data to correct coding errors and in order to match it with their own database. They have estimated that the SIGACTS describes 15,000 civilian deaths previously undocumented by IBC (BBC’s report is here). Most of these previously-unknown deaths occurred in small incidents, in which 1-3 people were killed. In academic articles, on blogs and at conferences about quantifying war casualties, there has been debate about whether deaths that occur in small incidents tend to be systematically underreported in IBC’s press sources. This new evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that IBC’s press data underreport small events in Iraq.

In reaction to the release of SIGACTS data, Les Roberts of Columbia University wrote that both IBC and SIGACTS are ‘systematically prone to under-report deaths’ and that his previously published estimations of total death tolls are likely to be well below the actual numbers he and his colleagues previously estimated. Roberts has cautioned the use of press sources for the purpose of counting casualties, as they fail to report a significant proportion of violent events. Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University, presents a parallel argument. He reminds readers that SIGACTS includes every death that was recorded by the Multi-National forces in Iraq, not every death that occurred during the ongoing war. SIGACTS’s reporting standards changed over time and the reporting procedure varied across units. In particular, IBC has noted that the SIGACTS data do not include any civilian casualties from 2004 operations in Fallujah.

This underreporting is not surprising. Both SIGACTS and the press and other data published by the IBC are convenience samples, i.e. they are not generated with the help of a random selection process. Both SIGACTS and IBC are well-run, careful projects, but even very good direct observations that collect information on violence systematically will tend to accumulate data that is unrepresentative of the actual conflict patterns they are attempting to uncover. Lists of data that fall into this category are thus unsuitable for drawing inferences on any population apart from the list itself. Simple lists of deaths are inadequate to characterize an entire country in the midst of a highly politicized war.

The hypothesized reasons for under-reporting in Iraq mentioned by Roberts and Shapiro are not unique to Iraq or the IBC and SIGACTS databases: changing reporting patterns across time and space due to organizational changes (as was the case with SIGACTS), better coverage of events in urban areas (as was the case for both IBC and SIGACTS in Baghdad), and varying levels of victim visibility, depending on victim and perpetrator characteristics, are factors that influence almost every database that collects information on violent events. In our experience, reporting and recording bias varies dramatically and can rarely be distinguished from the actual patterns of violence. In the case of Iraq it is therefore important to keep in mind that a) no list is (or will be) complete and b) new, independent sources of data are needed to understand the reporting biases of any single source.

A possible solution to overcome the bias of single lists is to use a statistical method known as multiple systems estimation (MSE), which can provide estimates for those cases that weren’t recorded in any list. MSE, also known as the capture-tag-recapture method, corresponds to the idea that each death has the possibility of being recorded by one, two, or more data sources. Depending on the degree of overlap of cases between the sources, the number of deaths that were not reported to any source will differ. This method has been used for estimating large-scale killings in Guatemala, Kosovo, Perú, Srebrenica, East Timor, and Colombia, among others.

For the two lists available for Iraq (SIGACTS and IBC) a simple two-system MSE model (the Lincoln-Peterson estimator) can be applied. For the period covered by SIGACTS (2004-2009), IBC reports 15,000 civilian deaths found only in the SIGACTS data, 27,000 found only recorded by IBC’s press sources, and 64, 000 recorded in both, for a total of 106,000. The two-system estimation gives us a slightly higher number of: (15k+64k)*(27k+64k)/(64k) = 112,000 civilian casualties, including an estimated 6,000 deaths recorded by neither source. This estimate assumes that the collecting patterns of IBC and SIGACTS were independent of each other, which is unlikely.

Roberts suspects that both sources cover similar cases, mostly coming from the Iraqi Government, focused on Baghdad and that both under-report small events and incidences of single killings. In statistical terms, the two sources are likely to be positively correlated, which biases the estimate downward. The true number of deaths is thus likely to be larger than 112,000 cases. In order to obtain more accurate estimates of the number of deaths, a third source would be required. Three or more sources would allow us to account for similar (or dissimilar) reporting patterns of the different sources.

The revelation of the Wikileaks war log data has altered our understanding of civilian casualties in Iraq: We now know that there were more small-event casualties than previously thought and that such casualties are underreported. Further information about the ‘new deaths’ revealed in the war logs could improve our understanding with regard to victim characteristics and patterns of violence across time and space. We welcome the important work IBC is doing to correct errors in the SIGACTS coding and to match their database with the SIGACTS data. Perhaps a third source will emerge, and from the three datasets, estimates could be made which would correct for systematic underreporting across types of events, regions, religious sect or period. Hopefully, a better understanding of how violence is reported in Iraq will help us to better correct for reporting bias in casualty figures in other conflict situations.

Verdict in Guatemala Disappearance Case!

2010-10-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Just got late-breaking news: the judges just rendered a guilty verdict in the trial I was about to discuss in the following blog post! Will share more details from our team later, but this is a great day for fighting impunity around forced disappearances.

Benetech Statistical Expert Testifies in Guatemala Disappearance Case

The Benetech Human Rights Program uses cutting edge computing methods and statistical analysis to provide objective evidence of human rights violations. The scientifically defensible data in our findings serve as a powerful tool to combat impunity and hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. A strong example of this work was shown on October 18th when Benetech statistical consultant Daniel Guzmán presented expert legal testimony in the trial of two former agents of the Guatemalan National Police, Abraham Lancerio Gómez and Héctor Roderico Ramírez. The officers have been accused of complicity in the disappearance of Guatemalan student and union leader Edgar Fernando García who vanished while in police custody in 1984. A conviction in this case would help establish, for the first time, the act of forced disappearance as a crime within the Guatemalan judicial system.

Guzmán’s testimony was based on his analysis of the Guatemalan National Police Archive which was discovered by chance in 2005 in a munitions storehouse in Guatemala City. This astonishing collection of crumbling papers, books, photographs and floppy disks was revealed to be the historic archive of the Guatemalan National Police which were disbanded after country's 1996 Peace Accords. The estimated 31.7 million documents in the archive produced from 1960 to 1996 contain critical information about police operations during Guatemala's 36 years of internal armed conflict during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.

Guzmán and his colleagues at the Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) have been analyzing the archive since 2006 when they were invited by the Guatemalan government and partner NGOs to develop a plan to examine the records. HRP director Dr. Patrick Ball developed a plan to collect a multi-stage random sample of the documents and secure the sample data with Benetech's Martus information management tool for careful examination. This analysis has resulted in a clearer understanding of contents of the archive and generated quantitative results that can answer questions about which police units or commanders may have been responsible for disappearances.

“The content of the expert testimony is important, but the competence of the expert is equally important,” says Jorge Villagran, IT manager of the archive project. “In the case of Benetech, credibility and technical competence are guaranteed.”

Guzmán’s expert testimony helped the judges in the case remove doubt about the authenticity and reliability of the documents. He showed that the records are consistent in structure and overall content with many other documents in the archive and were not chosen deliberately or selectively. He described the patterns of data found in the documents and the probability that police officials knew about the 667 documents related to García.

Guzmán’s statistical estimates about which police units had access to which documents showed evidence of communications between the army and police. This is critical because historical data has show that the Guatemalan army was most involved in human rights violations against civilians. Prosecutors hypothesize that the police may have carried out crimes against civilians ordered by the army.

“If prosecutors can establish that the archive is a reliable source of proof for them, it is huge,” says Guzmán. “There is a lot of potential in the archives to find information related to human rights violations that can serve as a resource for these kinds of cases.”

You can read more about the case at http://www.hrdag.org/about/guatemala-trial.shtml.

Bookshare International’s Viji Dilip Profiled in Magazine

2010-10-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

The staff I work with at Benetech are committed to the communities that we serve with our technology. Among the people I’m privileged to call a colleague here at Benetech is Viji Dilip, the International Program Coordinator for our Bookshare International service.

Washington Square Magazine, which is published by Viji’s alma matter San Jose State University, included a profile of Viji in their most recent issue. Entitled The Gift of Insight, the story recounts Viji’s personal journey and how it inspired her to work with members of our Bookshare service who have print disabilities that make it difficult for them to read traditional text.

Viji, who is from India, received a BA in accounting from Madras University and moved with her husband to the Bay Area. After receiving an MBA and CPA from San Jose State in 1995, and working for Hewlett-Packard and several tech startups, Viji received an unexpected diagnosis from her doctor. She was told that a brain tumor was pressing on her optic nerve and may cause her to become blind. After undergoing surgery, Viji emerged with her eyesight intact – and strong desire to reshape her career.

"I said to myself what if?” Viji told the magazine. “After that close brush with blindness, I decided I didn’t want to do anything more with accounting. I wanted to give back to society, to help people who didn’t have vision with their education so that they could become economically and socially independent."

After her surgery, Viji left her job at the startup company Net6 and volunteered for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic in Palo Alto, California. In 2005, she started volunteering for Bookshare, which is also based here at the Benetech headquarters in Palo Alto. Since Viji was raised in India, she began looking at the educational challenges faced by people from that country. She found that India was 20 to 30 years behind the United States in providing assistive technology for the blind. I heard we had a high powered finance executive volunteering on book scanning, and decided to meet her and learn more.

Even as a volunteer, Viji began bugging me about the need to expand Bookshare’s collection of accessible books and magazines to readers around the world. When we received a grant from the Bernard Newcomb Foundation in 2007 to take Bookshare international, I asked Viji to become Bookshare’s International Program Coordinator.

Vjii now works with organizations in Canada and the United Kingdom as well as in India, where Bookshare employs four people to scan and upload books. In countries outside the U.S., getting permission to scan and upload books in accessible formats can be a slow and complicated process.

"In underdeveloped countries, the biggest problem we face is that copyright issues have not been addressed by government in the local area," Viji told the magazine. "We get around those issues by talking to publishers on a one-on-one basis and gaining their permission."

As the magazine story notes, 15 Indian publishers have now agreed to make their books available to Bookshare. Other Indian publishers and authors are also coming forward to offer their titles. Viji has set up partnerships with several noted publishers including Seasons Publishing, based in Chennai, India and Sahitya Akademy which publishes award-winning titles in 15 local languages. In her quest to Bookshare International, Viji also collaborates with other international organizations including the International Council for the Education of the Visually Impaired and Sight Savers.

Bookshare International now offers texts in English, French, German and Spanish. Viji and the Bookshare engineering team expect to add Hindi and Tamil language books by the end of this year and other non-European languages soon thereafter. Viji explained to the magazine that these additions will "make a huge difference in places like India where a huge portion of the population uses the local languages to continue their education."

I’m proud to work with people like Viji who brings her personal commitment to service with her to work each day. As social entrepreneurs, we apply our hearts and our heads to create technology that serves all humanity.

Google Maps Dirty Trick or Malfunctioning Feature?

2010-10-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

[Update] Brewster and I discussed this, and it looks more like a malfunctioning feature. He pointed out that putting more of the address in gets the right location, i.e. "300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco CA" works. So, perhaps "300 Funston" is ambiguous enough that Google Maps is trying to figure out where it is, connects it to the Archive (Wayback Machine) and then routes to an obsolete location? Reported it to Google of course, but may take a while. [/update]

Wasted about 30 minutes this morning thanks to a weird coincidence. I'm going to the Internet Archive's new office at 300 Funston in San Francisco, to attend the Books in Browsers conference.

However, Google Maps routed me to a point two miles away when I typed 300 Funston into my Android phone's Google Map function. Not really knowing all of San Francisco's streets, I got out and recognized the old location of the Internet Archive. Walked up, and they said that the Archive had moved out a couple of months ago. Called a friend at a PC, and they got the same misroute to 116 Sheridan Avenue, San Francisco, California 94129.

Here's the link as it works right now: [deleted link], hope they fix it soon.

Any coincidence that Brewster Kahle happens to be one of the major thorns in Google's side when it comes to the Google Books lawsuit settlement? Inquiring minds want to know.

Or did Google Maps just know that I needed to go to the Main Post of the Presidio to honor the original location of the Archive?

Helpful hint for people hoping to go to the actual 300 Funston address: type in 298 Funston. That works!

Update: or the full address...

Delivering Bestsellers to the Bookshare Community

2010-10-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

An Insider Reveals How the Latest Hot Books Are Added to Bookshare’s Collection of Accessible Titles

A Guest Beneblog by Liz Halperin

After working for many years as a volunteer for Bookshare, I became a paid proofreader for the collection about two years ago. I now review books that are scanned and uploaded in formats that can be read using different forms of assistive technology such as text-to-speech, digital Braille or enlarged fonts. Most of the books I work with are books requested by students and titles from the New York Times (NYT) bestsellers list.

Last spring, I had a chance to visit “The Mother Ship,” Bookshare’s main office at the Palo Alto, California headquarters of Benetech, Bookshare’s parent nonprofit. While I was there, I discovered how the NYT bestsellers make it into the collection. I used to think that publishers just sent electronic copies to Bookshare. Wrong. While publishers do donate thousands of digital texts to Bookshare, the NYT bestsellers are added to the collection through a "people process." Since I was there to witness it, I want to tell you how it happens.

The Big Day is Friday, when we eagerly await email from Carrie Karnos about new book assignments. Carrie, who manages the scanning and proofing of books for Bookshare, has worked out a procedure.

First, Carrie and I waited impatiently for the week's books to be announced on the NYT website, always on Fridays, but at various times of day. Next, she checked the collection to see if any of the bestsellers were already there. Then we headed off to an independent bookseller who lets Bookshare buy new books at a discount and order others. We also picked up books Carrie had previously ordered - including special requests from students who need specific texts for their classes.

After returning to the Bookshare office, we collected more requested books that arrived from other sources Then Carrie examined various aspects of each book to determine the difficulty of proofreading it and recorded this information on The Master List.

Next, Carrie "chopped" the books in a special big scary sharp machine to remove the bindings and the spine. This freed up the pages which were placed in a fast scanner. The machine uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology to convert the text to a digital exact image file and to a second file format that we use for direct editing.

During this process, Carrie tells the three of us proofreaders (I’m one of them) which books are available for review - and helps negotiate who will take which book. The books we can’t proof immediately are outsourced to readers in other countries who take a little longer to proofread the texts. Once we sort out who is proofreading what, Carrie transfers the books to the main server where the files are kept forevermore. Copies of the files are sent to each individual proofreader and Carrie also proofs a few books herself each week.

This entire process is completed by Friday afternoon so bestsellers can be proofed and uploaded to Bookshare as soon as possible. If we see an error in a book, we can't break the copyright by correcting our digital version. This drives us crazy. If you see typos, a few will be ours in oversight, but most are in the original printed text. When Bookshare scans a book, the OCR program removes all accent marks from non-English languages. The proofreaders track down every accent mark and put them back. One book I worked on included more than eight languages, including Polish and Hungarian, with some unusual accent marks. Italics often come through with errors so they must also be carefully checked.

Of all I saw and participated in during my whirlwind week at Bookshare, this process for getting the bestsellers into the collection affected me most directly. When I returned home on Friday night, my new books were sitting there in my Bookshare folder waiting for me to download and proofread. Kudos to Carrie Karnos who keeps the books moving every Friday!!!

A note about Bookshare

Bookshare, the world’s largest accessible online library, serves more than 100,000 readers with visual impairments, and physical or learning disabilities. Bookshare’s collection of more than 80,000 books, newspapers and magazines, is free to qualified U.S. students thanks to support from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). Bookshare members in the U.S. who are not students pay a $50 annual fee.

Science Technology and Society Forum in Kyoto

2010-10-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'm in Kyoto, Japan for the STS forum, an incredible gathering of top scientists and policy leaders from around the world. The caliber of attendees is amazing from all countries: ministers of education and science, top scientists, university presidents. The event is the brainchild of Koji Omi, former Finance Minister of Japan. His concept was that science and technology was critical to the future of society, and he wanted to build an inclusive international forum of top leaders literally from all over the world to tackle major problems.

Of all the discussions I heard, the ones on climate change were the most exciting and compelling. The phrase "the failure of Copenhagen" was often repeated, especially poignant given that we were meeting in the same building where the Kyoto Protocols were agreed. There was special energy around the concept of climate adaptation: the idea that no matter what happens on controlling greenhouse gases (see, failure of Copenhagen), that climate change is already affecting the world and we will be having huge challenges adapting to that change.

People mentioned that there had been a reluctance to talk about adaptation, since it would take the focus off of the critical challenge of mitigation. But the consensus in the group was that we needed to get on climate adaption. We had a mind-blowing presentation from one of the engineering leaders on Venice's efforts to respond to sea level rise with giant barriers to the Venice lagoon. But, most climate adaptation strategies are going to by necessity be less expensive than that.

The biggest idea I heard was that while mitigation is a global issue, climate adaptation will be a local issue. Dan Goldin (former head of NASA) and Charlie Kennel (former head of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography) pulled together a proposal for what they call "Knowledge Action Networks," to help local community get access to data about how climate change was likely to affect their communities. Since I came to STS to plug open content, open data and transparency in general, it really resonated. It seemed like a larger scale version of what we are already doing for the conservation movement with Miradi, and what we've been kicking around as the "Carbon P&L" concept for a possible new social enterprise.

I'm looking forward to more brainstorming on this: very exciting!

Just Joined a New Federal Commission!

2010-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

I recently was sworn in by Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter as one of nineteen people serving on the Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities. The Commission has one year to do research, hold public hearings and make recommendations to Congress on what should be done to make higher education materials more accessible to students with disabilities.
We have top leaders from the Department, the disability community including students, publishers, the Copyright Office, academia and other experts. The law that Congress passed that directed the creation of the Commission has quite a number of issues we're supposed to work on, including definitions of qualifying students and instructional materials as well as considering what systems might be established to help accessibility be better delivered.

The details are linked to here in the Federal Register, and includes a pointer to the actual law section. Our first meeting was mainly preparatory:

We elected Gaier Dietrich and Jim Wendorf as chair and vice chair (two noteworthy disability leaders)
We were taught all about our ethics obligations and dos and don't as commissioners
We divided into groups tackling different aspects of our charge

I'm excited about the promise of this Commission to figure out where we should go next. Opportunity to higher education is a crucial need for all students, and especially students with disabilities. People and organizations with an interest in this issue should be sure to participate in the public process and make sure their voices are heard.

Mass Market Accessible Books

2010-09-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

We've worked with O'Reilly Media for a long time. They were the first publisher to sign on to deliver their books electronically to Bookshare back in 2003, and gave us permission to provide their books outside the U.S. We take their files and convert them to the DAISY format which is a digital format designed specifically to create accessible materials for people with print disabilities. The big advantage of DAISY over typical scanned files is that DAISY includes much more extensive navigation (chapters, sections, page numbers, etc.).

More and more publishers are asking that we return to them the DAISY files we create. We're excited about this trend and the opportunities it creates for the commercial availability of mass market accessible books.

O'Reilly is again leading the charge. Check out this O'Reilly's announcement that their ebook bundles now include DAISY talking book format files to see the fabulous work they're doing. Why is this a big deal? Because Bookshare is only available for people who qualify under a very narrow copyright exemption. Making these files available as part of the mass market product, O'Reilly is ensuring that EVERYONE who can benefit from accessible materials can actually get them.

Bookshare Volunteers Are the Best!

2010-09-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

When Bookshare was first created, we conceived of the concept of a digital library built by the people who use the library, instead of solely by librarians deciding what people with print disabilities should read. Using a provision of U.S. copyright law, our volunteers scanned the books they wanted to read and then were able to upload them to Bookshare so that others could enjoy these books as well.

Many of our books come straight from socially minded publishers at this point, but our volunteers still play a crucial role, and Bookshare would not be what it is today without them. This email from one of our volunteers illustrates just one of the ways volunteers continue to contribute to the collection (now well over 80,000 titles!)

With the addition of the book "Bright Wampum" to the collection today (September 7th), Bookshare is one of the few (if not the only) libraries in the world to have copies of all of Dorothy Lyons' novels for teens. These novels were mostly published in only one edition during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and are highly collectible. Some of this author's titles are exceedingly rare, with copies bringing hundreds of dollars when they can even be found in the book collectors' marketplace.

I want to thank all the volunteers who helped make possible my hopes of getting all of Dorothy Lyons books into the collection, especially Shelley, Mayrie, Mike (Misha) and Robert for their contributions in finding, scanning or proofreading one or more of these books. It wasn't easy! None of the Dorothy Lyons books are in print. The titles had to be hunted out across the country by Bookshare volunteers from their libraries, through used book sites and in eBay auctions. It took about a year to get them all, but we did it! smile.

Bookshare Volunteers are the best!

Judy s.

I just want to add my thanks to all of our Bookshare volunteers, and to agree with Judy that Bookshare Volunteers are, most definitely, the best!

Travel Tips for Social Entrepreneurs

2010-08-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

I'm just wrapping up a week of conversation on Social Edge, entitled Travel Tips for Social Entrepreneurs. I'm fascinated not only with the big questions in the social entrepreneurship field, but also the practical practices of doing the job of social entrepreneur better. One of those practices is how to travel as cost effectively as possible. The conversation ranged over how to use Priceline, choosing socially responsible travel products and an idea for staying with other social entrepreneurs. Here's how I kicked off the conversation:

We spend a lot of time talking about the big picture issues around social change. But, sometimes it’s important to get practical and talk about nuts and bolts issues. Being a social entrepreneur is all about doing more with less. So, how do you stretch your travel dollars?

As a social entrepreneur who is typically on the road more than half the time, I find myself thinking about this a lot. What’s the tradeoff between saving time and saving money? Is it worthwhile staying at that cheap hotel if TripAdvisor posts are dwelling on their bedbug problem?

And that’s just on domestic travel. So many social entrepreneurs have operations in multiple countries. How do you deal with travelling to rich countries or poor countries? How do you handle guests who have very different expectations about travel and accommodation?

When money goes from being unobtainium to merely tight, what travel restrictions do you loosen? Paying for hotels instead of hostels? Not forcing team members to share rooms? Taking nonstop flights instead of cheaper one-stops? Or, do you stick with habits honed in resource-famished times?

I love saving a buck, and I still arrange most of my travel myself. I’m looking forward to getting new ideas from other people that can help us all do more with less. I’ll be putting a few of my tactics into the mix as the conversation unfolds, such as:

* How I learned to love Priceline for getting cheap four-star hotels $85 for four star hotels in DC and London!
* How my excessive flying on one airline leads to great service and lots of free upgrades to business class
* The wonders of frequent flier programs, where the airline goes out of its way to take care of its best customers, even those who are always picking the cheapest fares possible
* How I got out of Heathrow on the first California-bound flight after the volcano ash flight suspension
* How we encourage employees to skip on hotels where practical
* Paying employees to not stay in a hotel and buy a nice dinner or a bottle of wine for their host. For example, I almost always stay with one of my cousins in New York City. Benetech will give me $50 a night in lieu of staying in an expensive hotel.

After personnel, travel costs are one of our biggest expenses. I’m sure this is true of a lot of other groups with national or international activities. Being proactive up-front about controlling travel costs and understanding the trade-offs is an important way to hold up your mission.

* What’s your travel tip? Do you have an example of penny-wise, pound foolish travel ideas that backfired?
* Do you have ideas for reducing your environmental impact while getting the job done? How can we make travel more effective and less wearing?

Making Exercise Equipment Accessible

2010-08-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

Benetech doesn't make tangible stuff: we've decided that our expertise is in making electronic bits. Software and content are easily scaled up. But, the world still needs tangible things, and the market often fails to deliver them.

Rich Thesing, a long-time disability activist and fellow Fellow of the American Leadership Forum in Silicon Valley, has been thinking hard on how to make exercise equipment accessible. As someone was injured as a result of an accident, Rich knows that there can be severe consequences for people with these kinds of disabilities if they don't maintain muscle tone in their limbs. There are lots of exercycles that are in health clubs and exercise rooms around the world, but they lack minor accessibility features to make them usable. Most people who are quads have partial use of their limbs, for example, little use of their legs but partial use of their arms. Rich's problem is that he can get his first foot onto the pedal and strapped in, but that he can't get his second foot in. He needs to rotate the pedal crank one half turn and then have it pause there as he puts his other foot into the second pedal. But, standard exercise equipment won't stop there.

Rich has been pushing the manufacturers of this kind of equipment to make this kind of adaptation. He figures that it shouldn't cost much to do. But, the manufacturers are pushing back: they say it will be too expensive. So, Rich asked me what I thought.

My response was that while I wasn't a mechanical engineer, I certainly knew someone who was. My brother, Dan Fruchterman, is a senior engineering manager at a major aerospace firm. I mentioned it to Dan and his response was that it should be straightforward. Not only that, after getting information from Rich on the existing equipment, Dan threw it out to his engineering team (full of mechanical engineers) to brainstorm. They came up with several ideas to adapt the exercycles to make them work easily for many people with quadriplegia. And, none of them cost very much to implement.

So, I really enjoyed a recent lunch with Rich Thesing and my brother Dan, where they talked about ways to help the manufacturers add this minor feature. And Rich was sure to point out the topical nature of this solution: our country has plenty of newly disabled veterans coming home and going through rehabilitation. They are going to need access to exercise equipment they can use independently to ensure their long term help.

It's fun to help solve problems, even if the help is mainly connecting the right people together!

A Modest Complaint to Bookshare

2010-08-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to incredible work on the part of socially responsible publishers, our volunteers and the Bookshare team, we've been adding books at at incredible rate: more than 10,000 books in the last month. As a result, I recently received the following complaint letter from one of our long-term members, Chancey Fleet:

Jim,

I would like to register a complaint! Bookshare is piling on books faster than I can read the titles. Ever since I was a kid, I was a title glutton. I went through every catalog the NLS had and every Braille Book Review. I did the same later with Web Braille, and whole months have gone by during which I knew every book that hit the collection.

This was viable, maybe even adaptive behaviour in a climate of scarcity. I could pluck out a handful of the finite number of books on offer and leave the rest, and if I didn’t have absolute choice, I at least got to be sure I wasn’t missing anything.

Not. Anymore. Bookshare is adding so much content that favourite authors of mine are creeping into the collection without my noticing. I’m finding whole herds of books I thought would be too frivolous ever to scan but that I secretly wanted to read but that that *I* would never scan because I would look silly. (E.G. a compendium of fashion mistakes spotted in Brooklyn. An anthology of rejection letters. Something called Zen Computer that gives you a meditation for every function key on the keyboard (the @ reminds you to consider your position in the universe!))..)

Seriously, you guys rock. I love this new pace and all the variety. Feel free to share this with whoever’s responsible for the awesomeness.

Best,

Chancey

Thanks, Chancey. We take all complaints seriously!

Footnote: NLS stands for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, part of the U.S. Library of Congress and the nation's number one provider of books for blind people. They also operate Web Braille, an online Braille ebook service with roughly ten thousand titles.

Exciting Social Enterprise Group I met at the Skoll World Forum

2010-08-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting people I met at the Oxford Skoll meeting this year was Raja Moubarak, founder of Winquest. Raja is a seasoned business executive with senior level experience in multinationals (Coca-Cola, B&W/BAT, BOC Group, Societe Generale) in Europe, Asia and in multiple Middle East/North African countries (MENA), as an entrepreneur and as Managing Director of one of the oldest retail groups in the MENA region.

His idea is straightforward: he believe the Middle East/North Africa region is ripe for values-centered for-profit social enterprises that can both make plenty of money and deliver social benefits. With his long expertise in bringing products to this region, he's working to find connections with companies interested in expanding into this area. But, just companies that have social good as a crucial part of their DNA.

It's probably not a coincidence that the Obama Administration is focusing efforts on entrepreneurship in the Muslim world: there's nothing like jobs to provide a moderating influence on a society. [Plenty of other things would help, like education and more political openness, but successful business enteprises and jobs would be a great start!]

I know I'll be watching to see if Raja's bold idea takes root: seems like a promising approach to sustainable social good.

The 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act

2010-07-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

This has been a really exciting week in Washington, DC, with the focus of today's 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's hard to imagine a world without the ADA, which was passed during my first year in the disability field. It became a model of civil rights legislation for people with disabilities, and I'm sure paved the way for the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.
Last week there was a strong technology focus in the events: I was invited to an event at the White House (actually, the Old Executive Office Building) to hear from senior leaders from the Administration make announcements and talk about the power or technology to help people with disabilities. Kareem Dale, the President's senior disability advisor, was the master of ceremonies, and he got the federal CTO and CIO , an FCC Commissioner, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce overseeing the broadband program, and a senior federal procurement policy guy there. Kareem wrote it up in a blog post about all the policy announcements, entitled The Power of Technology, The Power of Equality.
There were three demonstrations at the end of that session: I was most impressed with Dr. Hugh Herr of the MIT Media Lab, a double amputee who builds smart robotic feet that are better than regular human feet. These feet "know" when he's climbing or descending stairs or a ramp, and adjust the programing accordingly. He can also use his cell phone to reprogram his feet!

In terms of geek cred, it was hard to match the federal CTO Aneesh Chopra leaping into action to help the AV for the Apple iPad demo: above is my two picture sequence of him succeeding in getting it to work!

We then moved to the Commerce Department to see a bunch of tech demonstrations, which was followed by a brainstorming session that I particularly enjoyed. We discussed ideas about web accessibility as well as how to make physical accessibility information available using GIS (imagine a Yelp for accessibility information for each building).
Aneesh Chopra, the CIO of HHS and Greg Elin, the Chief Data Officer of the FCC (and former CTO of United Cerebral Palsy) led the brainstorm. I think it's an example of the convening power the administration has to bring people together around addressing challenges.

We're so excited about all this action that we announced today that we're celebrating the ADA by making Bookshare available free for three months to all Americans with qualifying disabilities (not just students). I think there are tons of veterans and adult people with disabilities who need what Bookshare has.
And, the big finale is today, the actual 20th anniversary of the ADA. I'm in DC waiting to head over to the actual White House for an event with President Obama (and I have to assume, hundreds of the leading disability advocates) this afternoon. Hope to have more to report on that soon!

Authorized Entities <> Trusted Intermediaries

2010-06-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

A hot topic at the SCCR20/WIPO discussions in Geneva on global access to materials by the print disabilities is the term "Trusted Intermediaries"("TIs"). This was first introduced (to my knowledge) in the Stakeholder's Platform discussions, which were the quickly ginned-up alternative option created in response to the original introduction at WIPO of the Treaty for the Visually Impaired ("TVI") by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay (and now co-sponsored by Mexico).

The concept of TIs uses U.S. and similar copyright exceptions as a starting point. In the U.S. exception, Section 121, posted at Bookshare as the Chafee Amendment, the term is "authorized entities." In the statute:

"authorized entity" means a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities;

In this case, authorized means authorized under the statute.

This is a crucial point. Under U.S. (and as far as I know, most of the other exceptions) law, there is no approval or authorization by other entities, whether government, publishing industry or the disability consumer organizations. When you use the exception, you are asserting that your organization meets this qualification. And, if a copyright holder doubts that your organization meets the requirement in making an accessible copy, they are welcome to file a legal complaint of copyright infringement and make the case. But, the burden of proof is not on the nonprofit agency, it's on the copyright holder making the complaint. Just to be clear, IANAL, I am Not a Lawyer, so this is my layman's understanding.

I'm not aware of any litigation in the U.S. that has ever been filed on this point. Compare that to the fair use exception, which has plenty of case law. Why? It must be that the definition of authorized entity is sufficiently clear that no publisher wants to try this out in court against a nonprofit that is truly working to help people with disabilities.

The lack of a requirement for permission is fundamental to the concept of an exception: the idea that you would need permission of the rightsholders to utilize an exception from copyright is an oxymoron. Yet, this is the requirement of the European proposal for TIs here at WIPO! And, the U.S. proposal has similar (but not quite as out there) language saying that the organization using the exception has to have the trust of both the publishers and the consumer groups. A requirement that does not exist in the U.S. exception.

To be clear, there is at least one major publisher who publicly states their contempt for organizations such as Bookshare and RFB&D that utilize their materials under an exception. As long as we obey the law, they are unlikely to sue us. But, if we're trusted by most publishers but one complains, does one publisher's veto stop the operation of exceptions or import/export?

It's becoming increasingly clear that the term of "Trusted Intermediaries" is loaded with the issue of "trust" becoming a codeword for having received permission. In discussions with the advocacy community here, there's a strong desire to discard this term.

The U.S. term "authorized entity" carries some of this freight to non-U.S. audiences who assume that some other authority provided the authorization.

A term that was brainstormed by some of the other great minds here was "Responsible Entities," which I think is quite good. I believe it delivers on the concepts in U.S. law, and addresses the core concerns of the advocacy community while providing the publishers with more confidence that exceptions (and especially imports/exports beyond existing norms) will be done by NGOs and government agencies that are following laws and acting responsibly.

By the way, there are other requirements in these proposals that I'm not commented on. I'm solely focused on the requirements of a nonprofit organization/government agency needs to meet to be eligible to use the exception/norms.

I'm hopeful that by changing the term, and ditching the idea that Responsible Entities need to do more than meet the standards in the law to be able to take advantage of these copyright exceptions.

My remarks just made at WIPO today

2010-06-23T04:12:00.000-07:00

Statement of Benetech to the
20th Session of the
Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights

at the World Intellectual Property Organization
June 23, 2010, Geneva, Switzerland

• My nonprofit organization, Benetech, operates Bookshare, the largest online library for people with print disabilities, with the mission of bringing accessible books to all people with print disabilities around the world
• We have roughly 100,000 members in the U.S. with print disabilities, with more than 70,000 copyrighted works in our library, the majority of which have been created under the US copyright exception by volunteers, mainly people with disabilities themselves, helping each other.
• At Bookshare, we have been very sensitive to the complaints of blind and print disabled people around the world, feeling that they have been unfairly denied access to our extensive collection
o My explanation that it’s simply copyright law doesn’t make them feel any better
• We would like a binding instrument so that we can bring all of our collection, including the 15 to 20,000 new books we add every year, to all people with print disabilities
• Until that day, we work directly with publishers to provide voluntary licenses at no charge to us.
• We now have global permissions for around 8,000 copyrighted books out of our 70,000.
• We have been especially successful in receiving blanket agreements from major trade book publishers such as HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Perseus, Scholastic, Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as many university presses (including Cambridge U Press). Most publishers don’t say yes or no. Many of the publishers do provide us with permissions do not have global rights, and limit the availability of these books to certain jurisdictions
• We first launched international Bookshare in India and have more than 1000 members there, as well as permissions agreements with more than ten publishers in India
• We have recently concluded agreements with national and regional groups serving people with disabilities in countries including Denmark, Australia, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria and China.
o We’d love to serve the community of people with print disabilities in your country, with English and Spanish today and we hope your national languages in the future
o We’re planning on launching an Arabic language service later this year
• As wonderful as these permissions are, several years of work has led to less than 100 publishers making these agreements. Compare that to Google Book Search, with more than 25,000 publishers signed up for their commercial program in a similar time period. Google, who has been sued by the same publishers for alleged copyright violations.
• That is why we have exceptions: to lower transaction costs and secure the civil rights of people with disabilities to have equal opportunity
• That is why we need a binding instrument that makes copyright exceptions a global norm, and allows for import and export of these materials.
• We need a binding instrument that doesn’t give publishers veto power over the organizations who comply with national and international laws and norms
• We need a binding instrument that doesn’t establish a thicket of bureaucratic requirements to discourage access
• We need a binding instrument that makes getting disabled people the books they need easier, and not harder
• If we get that binding agreement, then we can ensure access to printed materials for education, employment and social inclusion for all people with print disabilities around the world.

Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at WIPO

2010-06-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

I'm here in Geneva for the 20th Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting. This is the international forum for discussing copyright issues, and it is the body considering the Treaty for the Visually Impaired (TVI).

Jamie Love of KEI took the above picture of ACB's Eric Bridges, NFB's Scott LaBarre (and his wife Anahit Galechyan) and me at the meeting: I was busy tweeting what I was hearing at my Twitter handle of @JRandomF.

Hot issue this week are the now four proposals on solving the problem of access to print by people with print disabilities globally:

The TVI: the treaty sponsored originally by the World Blind Union and supported at WIPO by Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Mexico. [I was one of the co-drafters of the treaty language]
The U.S. draft Joint Recommendation
The EU draft Joint Recommendation
The African broader Treaty draft

Look forward to updating on Twitter what's happening.

Supporting Vulnerable Human Rights Defenders in the Congo

2010-06-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Dr. Patrick Ball, Benetech's Chief Scientist and Vice President of our Human Rights Program, is spending much of this year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Patrick is working with a UN human rights project.

The importance of supporting human rights in the DRC was underscored this month when it was reported that Floribert Chebeya, executive director of one of the DRC’s largest human rights organizations, Voice of the Voiceless (VSV), was found dead on the outskirts of Kinshasa. Chebeya, who also directed a national network of DRC human rights groups, died of unknown causes after being summoned on June 1st to meet General John Numbi, the head of the national police force. According to news reports Chebeya was found dead in his car early the next morning.

Amnesty International notes that there has been increased oppression of human rights defenders in the DRC this past year including illegal arrest, prosecution, phone threats and repeated summoning to the offices of the intelligence services. Benetech staff member Vijaya Tripathi has trained human rights workers in the DRC to use our Martus data management tool to create searchable and encrypted databases - and back their data up remotely to publicly available servers. Martus helps protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses.

Veronique Aubert, deputy director of Amnesty's Africa program, said in a statement that Chebeya had campaigned to uphold the rights of the constitution and democracy in the DRC parliament and had been harassed by authorities in the past. Aubert called for a full government investigation of Chebeya’s death as did Human Rights Watch.

Benetech provided Martus training in October to members of Chebeya’s VSV organization, which participated in a meeting sponsored by the International Center for Transitional Justice. We will continue to assist VSV if they request. As Aubert said in her statement, “Those who defend the rights of others must be allowed to continue their work free of harassment and persecution. Floribert’s death is a great loss for the human rights community.”

Heading out on the road

2010-06-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

I'm now on the road for more than 5 weeks on combo business trips and family vacation. DC this week and Geneva next week (international copyright).
As I headed out the door, I ran into Scott Rains and we had a picture taken of Scott in his Brazil jersey (after the U.S., I'm a big Brazil fan too). Scott is helping with the Bookshare volunteer community as a Benetech Fellow.

I can tell World Cup fever is really hitting!