Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Big complex social problems. Your skills and experiences. Benetech. Combining those three potent ingredients is how we change the world. If you’ve been burning to use your considerable talents to make a difference, rather than make a lot of money, it’s time you considered joining our growing team. We are looking for more than a dozen motivated individuals to make the leap to positive social impact. From executives to summer interns, from engineers and product managers, to communications and outreach professionals, we have a wide range of opportunities. From children with disabilities to African human rights activists, you will have direct exposure to how Benetech’s products and services change lives for the better. Our benefits are great, and our pay is excellent by nonprofit standards! Flexibility is one of our core values. It’s just one of the reasons that Benetech is the rare software company that is majority women (also true of our managers). We believe in wildcards : i...

Guest post by  Betsy Beaumon, President, Benetech We are seeking visionary leaders to join Benetech in applying technology to advance the rights of disadvantaged people around the world. Technology is playing an ever larger role in increasing respect for human rights and delivering better services, and we have two rare opportunities to lead world-class tech-for-good programs. Benetech is hiring new Vice Presidents for our Global Literacy and Human Rights programs. You are the leader we are looking for if you see the combination of social good and businesslike management as the answer to pressing problems throughout the world. You are someone who dreams about using your management and leadership skills and love of technology for social impact, exceeding the bounds of what a regular for-profit business can do. You’ve come to the right place: Benetech. We are Silicon Valley’s deliberately nonprofit software company. Benetech is organized as a nonprofit, but run like a busine...

Scientist / Data Analysis Engineer / General Techie Want to help save the world with your code? Like going to hackathons and wish you could get paid to work on a good cause full time? Want to help assemble evidence used to convict dictators of war crimes? We're Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and we're hiring right now ! What we do: Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) develops database software, data collection strategies, and statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. This technology and analysis is used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations around the world. We help the human rights movement speak truth to power, because we believe each story of human rights abuse is a tool for justice. Check out recent press coverage of our work, featuring the head of our human rights team, Dr. Patrick Ball, in Foreign Policy magazine and NPR's On The Media . What yo...

I was impressed when I heard Tim O'Reilly 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 the field because I loved doing tech. 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 Matter...