Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

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 marketin...

The final stop for my Micronesia trip was Guam, a U.S. territory. Arriving on Guam felt like coming back to the United States, although it's more like Hawaii than the mainland! Guam has a huge American military presence: the armed forces control about a third of the island. The presence is growing: the U.S. is relocating our units from Okinawa to Guam and this could grow the island's population anywhere from 20% to 40%. The military and tourism are Guam's two big industry. Japan is the biggest source of tourists for Guam, with growing numbers from other Asian nations like South Korea. I enjoyed getting a chance to tour around the the southern part of the island with Mike Terlaje (U of Guam CEDDERS) and Chuck Hitchcock of CAST(pictured above) on my final afternoon there (and even squeezed in half an hour of snorkeling), and seeing Spanish ruins, waterfalls, and bay after spectacular bay. The native people of Guam are called Chamorros, and the language is resurgent. ...

Bookshare.org hits 35,000 Books! It's always exciting when we hit another milestone like this. The milestones are going to be coming ever faster, now that we have the Bookshare.org for Education project (funded by the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education). We're committed to increasing our rate of title growth by a factor of four or five while improving quality. Mr. Jim and Ms. Lisa go to Washington Lisa Friendly and I just spent a fascinating week in Washington. Apparently, winning a competition for the largest award made by OSEP in memory (ever?) caused quite a stir. Although we are well known in the national and international disability field, it's been about ten years since I spent much time in DC (last time was the original Section 508 federal advisory committee in the 90s). We need to now spend a lot more time acquainting Washington decision makers about why OSEP made an inspired choice in selecting Bookshare.org as the provid...