Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

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...

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...

Guest Beneblog by Ann Harrison In 2006, the Benetech Human Rights Program was asked to participate in one of the most important human rights data projects in the world. The Guatemalan government human rights ombudsman invited the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to analyze the contents of the estimated 80 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive or the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). HRDAG designed a process to randomly sample the Archive and the archivists began using Benetech’s Martus software to organize and secure information generated from the samples. Just last month, the University of Texas at Austin made a large portion of the Archive available to the public unveiling a digital repository that contains 12 million of these critical records. This repository is an important step forward for the people of Guatemala and those seeking information about human rights abuses that occurred during the country’s 36 years o...

Today, December 10th, the international community is observing Human Rights Day to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since its adoption at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Declaration has become a universal standard for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. On International Human Rights Day, we pay tribute to all human rights defenders, celebrate the recent victories of the human rights community, and recognize the challenges that still lie ahead in the global struggle to advance justice, accountability and an end to impunity. 2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first ele...

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...

Patrick Ball and I have often discussed the risks to social justice groups from using unlicensed proprietary software. A government could suppress a group using "piracy" as a reason, rather than criticism of the government. We've seen this happen in places like Russia. That's why it's heartening to read an article like this in the Christian Science Monitor, Russia rights groups get help from unlikely champion: Microsoft . It doesn't help Microsoft to be associated with suppression of environmental and human rights groups, and it's great to see them do the right thing!

Inside naked light bulbs reveal bare cinder-block walls, stained concrete floors, desks and filing cabinets. Above all there is the musty odor of decaying paper. No, this is not a description of Benetech’s Palo Alto, California headquarters. Rather, this is a hot-off-the-presses Smithsonian Magazine article about our Human Rights Data Analysis Group’s work in Guatamala. HRDAG, as we affectionately call the group, is working with the archive of the now disbanded Guatemalan National Police, which as the Smithsonian puts it, was “implicated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of tens of thousands of people during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.” Check out the whole story here. And don’t forget to look at the photo gallery, which features some great pictures taken by Benetech’s Communications Director Ann Harrison. One photo features Patrick Ball, director of Benetech’s human rights program examining documents from the archive.