Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Last October, I had the pleasure and honor to visit the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, to accept on behalf of Benetech the 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation (ESI). The ESI Award recognizes outstanding individuals and organizations whose innovations blend methods from the worlds of business and philanthropy, and that challenge the status quo to create sustainable social value with a potential for large-scale impact. CASE launched the ESI Award in 2009, and Benetech is proud to join the company of past award recipients. CASE is a research and education center that promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact through the adaptation of business expertise. Since its founding in 2002, CASE has been at the forefront of providing thought leadership for the growing field of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is a new field whose actors will all benefit from a systematic searc...

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...

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...

For the past ten years, Benetech’s Bookshare library has provided accessible books for people with print disabilities. Bookshare helps people who cannot read standard text participate in the world of ideas. This recent holiday season, Benetech began supporting an innovative organization that helps people with disabilities develop their creative abilities and become working artists. During our holiday party, we displayed thirty pieces of art provided by Creativity Explored , a San Francisco-based nonprofit arts organization. Creativity Explored works with more than 120 artists with developmental disabilities, providing services that help these artists create, exhibit, and sell their art. Benetech worked with Creativity Explored to select a variety of paintings, drawings and prints. After admiring this collection of art at our holiday party, our staff cast votes for their favorite works. Benetech has now acquired quite a number of pieces of lively, playful, evocative art that will be di...

Gather a group of social entrepreneurs to brainstorm ideas to improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities, and you will harvest an array of innovative solutions. Share these ideas during a vibrant conversation with the number one champion in the Senate for people with disabilities, and you can count on a disability rights advocate who is prepared to mobilize support and resources to promote policies that will create an employment environment in which these cool innovations remain inspirational but become unremarkable. Recently, I had the pleasure to host Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) for exactly such a meeting of minds with ten fellow social entrepreneurs. I’m happy finally to get an opportunity to reflect here on that important event. Senator Harkin is a longtime advocate for people with disabilities. His signature legislative achievement is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. This landmark federal law, known as the “Emancipation Proclamation for people w...

By Patrick Ball On 14 February 2012, the New York Times reported that a Swiss team had found a weakness in a key algorithm used to make secure connections online. We were worried because the algorithm (called RSA) is also a central part of Martus , our self-encrypting database that backs itself up to a network of servers. The bottom line: We've consulted with cryptographers and studied the Martus code, and we do not believe that there is a weakness affecting Martus users. The flaw turns out to be related to a design error in the implementation of RSA in specific "embedded" devices, specifically firewalls and routers. It's not a general problem with RSA, and there's no current risk to Martus users. The way this flaw emerged has motivated us to review Martus's security model, and we are pleased with how well it has stood up. I've organized the detailed discussion as a series of questions. What exactly is the problem? How did this happen? Does it affect Ma...

A guest Beneblog by Max Schneider People don’t typically associate boisterous merengue music with high-tech statistical analysis. Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I heard the playful notes of a street band wafting through the window while in Guatemala with Benetech's Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). You see, HRDAG is anything but a typical organization. But first: why was I, a fresh graduate of UCLA, in Guatemala in the first place? (It’s funny, my parents asked the same question.) As an intern with HRDAG , I was part of the team analyzing data drawn from documents in the National Police Archive, a cache of approximately 80 million sheets of paper kept by the police system during the Guatemalan Civil War, a 36-year long conflict that ended in 1996. Our statistical analysis is being used as evidence for an upcoming trial charging former Police Chief Colonel Hector Bol de la Cruz with crimes related to the disappearance of a trade union and student leader in 1984...