Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Recently I had the opportunity to get introduced to Gerald Nelson , senior climate change researcher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Jerry and I had a great conversation about open sourcing of agricultural scientific models, such as those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their climate change reports. An expert on agricultural economics and spatial analysis, Jerry most recently served as a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, where he led major projects on food security and climate change issues. He was also the principal author of a recent report you may have heard of: “ Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate ,” which was released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in May 2014, calling on the United States government to integrate climate change adaptation into its global food security strategy. Jerry is involved in collecti...

This post originally appeared on CSRwire Talkback . The staff at  Benetech , the nonprofit tech company I lead, recently came together to answer this question: “What values define our identity and drive our work?” It was a very meaningful exercise for our entire team, resulting in what we call “ The Seven Benetech Truths .” Among them are truths like “We Get Stuff Done” and “Value Flexibility” — highlighting that we focus intensely on results and upholding our commitments, while also being flexible about how we get the work done. For many in the nonprofit space, being “flexible” and “getting stuff done” don’t always go hand in hand. But for an organization like Benetech, naming them as part of our values and putting them into action has led to better ideas and stronger products. Our most recent initiative,  SocialCoding4Good , and last week’s launch of its  Corporate Partner Program , which offers companies a new, skills-based volunteering channel for employee engage...

Last week I was invited to attend Microsoft’s Citizenship Accelerator Summit. This was an opportunity for Microsoft’s management, including Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s CEO) and other senior executives, to share what socially beneficial activities Microsoft is up to. Some of this was either predictable (but laudable) such as supporting volunteerism or the United Way, or activities I was aware of and have admired in the past. This latter category included such great projects as Tech Soup Global, which distributes donated Microsoft products at a deep, deep discount (a service we’ve used at Benetech for years) as well as support for the efforts of NetHope in disaster relief. NetHope is the organization of the CTOs/CIOs of the major global humanitarian NGOs, and gets a fair amount of support from Microsoft, Cisco and other tech companies. The most interesting project I saw was in the admittedly dark and unpleasant topic of combating child porn on the Internet. As the Microsoft staff poi...

I recently had a great meeting with Terry Farris and Alan Keliipuleole of the newly launched ammado web platform . It’s an impressive web-based application for helping multi-national corporations engage their employees and customers in social sector activities such as volunteering or donating. It’s the brainchild of an Irish tech entrepreneur, Peter Conlon. I know Terry because he was UBS’ point guy on philanthropy in Singapore and Asia before joining ammado. The challenge around something like this is critical mass, and the ammado team seems to be aiming very high in terms of execution. The site already works in a dozen languages and support for giving in more than twenty currencies. So, a high tech company with operations all over the world can engage their employees in each country to get involved with local charities, operate matching gift programs and so on. They also have a charitable gift-card concept for employees or customers (buy $250 of product, get a $10 or $20 gift c...

I've been a long-time subscriber to Dave Farber's IP list (for Interesting People). I frequently see comments from Lauren Weinstein's blog. He writes very well, and is a frequent critic of high tech companies on privacy issues. This week there was a great post, Lauren Weinstein's Blog: For Google and Others, Few Good Deeds Go Unpunished, where Lauren gave a very interesting and even somewhat sympathetic analysis of Google. The most interesting part for me was: I simply don't sense in Google today the sort of utterly predatory attitude toward its users that does seem to pervade some other major Internet-related firms. This is not to say that I agree with all Google policies -- as regular readers of this blog know. But I believe it's safe to say that even many (or most) Google employees also don't necessarily agree with all of Google's policies. It seems clear from public statements that even the Google leadership feels internally conflicted at times r...