Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Silicon Valley has a problem. In our quest to build better products and better meet the needs of the world for information, we built the most amazing system for effortless government surveillance as a byproduct. It is now incumbent on Silicon Valley to remedy this situation. Forcing tech companies to weaken their products through compelling the creation of backdoors would be a massive step backwards. Whatever the power of search engines or social networks, it’s really the smartphone that is the most incredible tool for tracking our every move and activity. With access to the information collected by a person’s smartphone, it’s probably straightforward to figure out everything important about that person. Who they love. What religion they profess. Their ethnicity. What drugs (legal or illegal) they consume. What content they read or watch. What laws they violate. Every secret. And, without encryption of this information, the makers of smartphones had effectively handed those s...

My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. In this update, I’m delighted to be able to share Benetech’s latest efforts to do both. First, I’ll cover our biggest fundraising effort of the year: individual philanthropy is crucial to us; it’s the portion that makes 10X impact possible! Then I’ll share the latest stories on the impact of our tech volunteerism and human rights tech efforts as well our new tech leadership. Highlights of this Update: Join Benetech in Making the World Better for All SocialCoding4Good and New Tech Leadership Human-Oriented Tech for Human Rights Join Benetech in Making the World Better for All At Benetech, we touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals in often-difficult situations. From people in Latin America who face severe wate...

Our networked world has advanced to a point where information technology is touching all aspects of society. The cost of prototyping and deploying new technology tools is now extremely low and data has the potential to accelerate social progress in areas ranging from poverty to human rights, education, health, and the environment. However, we have yet to come to grips with what is ethical and what the laws should be in relation to rapidly changing technologies. This post originally appeared on the blog of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). At Benetech, we regularly grapple with questions related to this issue. For instance, we ask, how can we harness the power of technology for positive social impact; and how can we mitigate the risks to privacy and civil rights posed by the age of big data? As engineers who want to do the right thing, we follow four general guidelines: first, when it comes to d...

Last week, the Benetech Human Rights Program released version 4.5 of Martus —our free, open source, secure information collection and management software—which includes major updates and usability improvements. Our goal is to make it far easier for groups that work with vulnerable populations keep the sensitive information they collect confidential. Having long supported human rights activists, we know the importance of confidentiality when working with victims and witnesses. The biggest highlight of this release is that Martus 4.5 can now be configured in less than 10 minutes by anyone with basic digital literacy skills, so that even less tech-savvy users can easily and quickly implement Martus’ secure documentation capabilities with distributed backup. Martus 4.5 features a new Configuration Wizard for account setup, offering fresh look-and-feel and greatly improved user experience. Additionally, major enhancements to its architecture simplify the secure backup, sharing, and distr...

10X: ten times the impact. That’s what’s been on my mind lately. How can our existing successful programs reach ten times more people? How can we use technology in a new way to improve people’s lives that is an order of magnitude better? Can we help stimulate the creation of far more technology-for-good ventures? The Benetech team has already accomplished great things for our users, but there is so much more we can do. Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice. But what about everybody else? While it’s not a panacea, technology has been the engine of so many improvements in society. The time has never been better to think 10X bigger! I have disruptive approaches to social innovation in mind, with an increasingly connected society where the cost of prototyping and deploying new products is extremely low, and where innovation is no longer the sole purview of well-funded for-profit corporations. We del...

Meet Kevin and “Sophia” (who anonymously shared her story with my team). When Kevin was in kindergarten he had an organic brain injury, which forced him to have to relearn everything from walking to using the bathroom. There were several years where Kevin struggled in school because his vision was blurry and this made reading normal size print grueling. He could no longer keep up with his peers in the classroom. One day when Sophia was in fifth grade, she suddenly went blind from an inexplicable disease. Sophia and her family were left confused and concerned about her future in the classroom. Braille books saved her from isolation and she became an insatiable reader. However, she soon encountered the frustrating “accessible book famine” because very few books available were available in Braille. This reality changed when both Kevin and Sophia learned about the accessible online library  Bookshare , an initiative of Silicon Valley technology nonprofit  Benete...

You may already know that I plan in earnest to provide my personal President’s Updates as quarterly informal reports, but that all too often I fall behind on this well-intended schedule—as is the case with the update you’re reading now! Don’t get me wrong: I love writing my updates. However, technology is transforming innovation at its core and our team at Benetech does quite well in leveraging this “innovation at warp speed” for social good. In fact, we’re doing so well in that respect that I get to engage more and more in new opportunities to advance our nonprofit mission—but less in writing my updates. In all seriousness, 2013 has been an incredibly busy and productive year for us. I’m excited to share highlights from our work and its significance for the multitudes we serve. Highlights of this Update: Global Literacy Human Rights Benetech Labs Communications Global Literacy Bookshare celebrated a double milestone this summer, reaching over 200,000 available titles ...

This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army’s Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women and children. Although reports of the massacre appeared in the United States, Salvadoran army and government leaders denied them and, all too soon, El Mozote was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1993, when a reconstruction of these events by American journalist Mark Danner first appeared in The New Yorker , that the full story of the El Mozote massacre was brought to light and sent shock waves through the international community. I was aghast that it could take a dozen years for the world to believe the massacre had happened. The tough question that ran through my mind was: How can we as technologists in Silicon Valley help prevent this kind of atrocity? Delivering my opening remarks at the Martus' 10th Anniversary A decade later, in 2003, Benetech —the nonprofit tech company I f...

This post originally appeared on the new Benetech's Blog . Secure tools to document human rights violations, such as those developed by Benetech’s Human Rights Program, have become critically important in efforts to pursue reform and seek justice—and in keeping human rights defenders safe. When widely deployed, these tools have the potential to make lasting impact by empowering people to fight abuse and advance democracy. In recent years, the possibilities of what can be achieved with human rights fieldwork and advocacy has expanded as the worldwide use of mobile phones has increased and significant advances have been made in Internet and mobile technology. We’re excited to share that our Human Rights Program has been awarded a two-year, $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) to realize some of those possibilities. Collin Sullivan, staff member of Benetech's Human Rights Field Team, on a field visit in ...

I recently had the pleasure of visiting one of our longtime Martus partners in Thailand, The Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma ( ND-Burma ). It was so gratifying to see firsthand how Martus , a free and open-source software tool developed by Benetech, is empowering people to be the change they wish to see. Martus enables human rights workers to securely document and organize information about violations in a way that protects those who would face violence and repression for telling their stories. Jim Fruchterman with ND-Burma members In the years since the 1988 suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations, the military junta in Burma has committed many thousands of human rights violations, including killings, torture, forced displacement, rape and political imprisonment. ND-Burma, a Thailand-based coalition of over ten human rights groups, has been collecting narrative testimonies from victims and witnesses of human rights abuses by the Burmese regime. We have exten...

Almost anyone from the human rights field will tell you that the work can be as rewarding as it is challenging. When you look at the barriers faced by those defending and advocating for human rights—from the danger of hostile governments and perpetrators, to victims who are naturally suspicious of any support, to the lack of funding necessary to carry on your work—you can see how overwhelming it can be. And yet there are also amazing and fulfilling benefits—bringing the truth to light, making human rights defenders more powerful and helping victims find peace through acknowledgment, reconciliation and even, sometimes, justice. At Benetech, we’re looking for only the best of the best to take on the leadership of our Human Rights Program. There’s a lot on the line—for the person we hire, for our organization and for the people we serve—so we want someone who will be both riveted by and successful in this critical position. That’s why I’ve come up with this “anti job description.” I...

From a Project to an Organization: Benetech Successfully Spins Off the Human Rights Data Analysis Group Benetech is celebrating a major milestone: On February 1, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)—which focuses on the statistical and analytical side of Benetech’s human rights work—spun out from being a project within our organization to become its own, independent group. Dr. Patrick Ball, who has led our Human Rights Program since 2003, now heads HRDAG as its Executive Director and Dr. Megan Price, formerly a senior statistician at Benetech, has joined Patrick as the organization’s Co-Founder. Spinning off projects when they reach sustainability, and when doing so would allow them to better achieve their mission, is all part of the Benetech model. As a matter of fact, the funding for Benetech to start Bookshare and our Martus human rights software project came from a successful spinoff of  our first social enterprise, the Arkenstone reading machines, which we sold to...