Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Majora Carter is on a quest to save the world one community at a time. That’s because she believes that no one should have to leave his or her neighborhood to live in a better one. Granted, this is an audacious goal, but Majora’s unique approach to urban renewal has already led to successful revitalization initiatives in her native South Bronx, N.Y., and she’s well underway bringing positive change to many more communities. Her rise to the position of a renowned urban revitalization strategist is no surprise when you witness firsthand her relentless energy and entrepreneurial spirit. I had the pleasure of meeting her earlier this year for an exciting conversation. Majora’s life journey is an inspiring story. She grew up in Hunts Point, a South Bronx neighborhood that for decades was plagued by poverty, violence and ecological degradation. Naturally, she was eager to escape. Education was her way out, but when she signed up for graduate studies at New York University, she returned t...

Guest Beneblog by Vijaya Tripathi The first ever Martus users group meeting took place earlier this month in Chiang Mai, the capital of Northern Thailand. Martus is Benetech's free and open source software package designed for human rights activists to collect stories and data about human rights abuses. For me personally, the meeting was a rare experience. I have led Martus outreach and training for the past 4 years and worked with human rights defenders all over the world, but because of the project-specific nature of our work, I interact with each of our partners separately. This global Martus meeting brought together individuals who use Martus to address different human rights documentation and security needs in widely varied projects, to share their successes and challenges with the software. It was surreal and incredibly exciting to see these inspiring people, my colleagues and friends, assembled in one place to launch the next generation of Martus. Our mandate, broadly speaki...

A Guest Beneblog by Vijaya Tripathi As outreach coordinator for Martus , Benetech’s secure software application, I travel to many countries where human rights defenders need tools to gather, organize and back up information about human rights violations. Over the past few years, I have seen human rights groups become much more sophisticated about how they use technology to document human rights abuses. My most recent visit to Nigeria confirmed this trend. While visiting the country, I met with members of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) who are using a growing collection of technology tools to confront reported human rights incidents. Nigerian security forces have been accused of a series of abuses including extrajudicial killings, election violence and vote rigging. During my first visit to the Nigerian capital of Abuja last April, I learned that a member of the NHRC who had been monitoring local elections had been beaten and unlawfully detained. Human rights monitors in N...