Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

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 l...

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 su...