Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I've been privileged to meet so many awesome social entrepreneurs around the world, doing fabulous work without much recognition (and often, even less funding). Jamila Hassoune is one of those social entrepreneurs, and we share a love for books and the power of access to books. We've been in touch for almost fifteen years, and I met her in person in 2014 when I was attending the diplomatic conference that resulted in the Treaty of Marrakesh. She's known as the Librarian of Marrakesh,  in recognition of her dedication to books and her role as Morocco's first woman bookseller. She leads Book Caravans into Morocco's rural regions to share knowledge, books and history with students and women. She just sent me the announcement of her new Book Caravan: The 13th book caravan Under the theme: The valorization of our heritage is a responsibility of our present and our future. Jamila Hassoune is pleased to announce the 13th Edition of the book caravan from ...

One of the joys of my role is meeting other social sector leaders: people with a powerful passion for good.  We learn from each other, and try to help each other when we can.  Jamila Hassoune Ten years ago, I started corresponding with a fascinating woman from Morocco, Jamila Hassoune.  Over time, I learned more and more about her work and background.  She was the first woman bookseller in Morocco.  Her love for books led her to create the Book Caravans: treks each April out to a village in the desert or the mountains of Morocco.  She would bring books especially for children and women, and conduct a couple of days of workshops on wide-ranging topics about enterprise, culture, history, poetry and books. Over the time I corresponded with Jamila by email, she started becoming better known in Europe.  One Italian book was written about her entitled the "La libraia di Marrakech," the Librarian of Marrakesh. Last year, I was able to meet Jamila i...

The View from an Authorized Entity  Many Bookshare users (and potential Bookshare users!) have been asking about the Treaty of Marrakesh (formal name: The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities. What’s in it; what does it mean; how does it affect Bookshare members? In the popular online acronym, IANAL (I am not a lawyer). However, as the founder of the Bookshare online library, we have a great deal at stake in how the Treaty gets implemented. Although it might seem like a complicated document , we’re really excited about it because we think it will greatly improve global access for people with bona fide print disabilities. Here’s our laymen’s take on the major provisions of the Treaty. The Treaty of Marrakesh, Top Issues: What’s the goal of the Treaty? The goal of the Treaty is to end the book famine for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. Ultimately, t...

I liked what our Bookshare team did for their electronic holiday card!

There's so much going on these days at Bookshare: a growing community that's getting hard to keep track of! We came up with a book wishlist for donors who wanted to pitch in and buy specific books requested by Bookshare members. We have talented members of the team that whip together graphics and even videos to promote these! It was fun singing along in the Bookshare holiday video . One donor made a special offer to our top volunteers, those who have provided at least 150 books to Bookshare: that they could request any one book and we'd (not they!) get the book scanned and into Bookshare. More than fifty book requests have already come in. Our Volunteer Coordinator, Pavi Mehta, sent me this email last week and I thought it was definitely blog-worthy! From: Pavi Mehta Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 11:36 AM To: Bookshare Team Subject: Thank You Notes from the Volunteers Hi All, Just wanted to send out these snippets of appreciation from volunteers (in response to w...

Guest blog by Pavi Mehta, Volunteer Coordinator Open source champion Mozilla.org kicked off seven days of service earlier this month: September 14-21st thousands of people donated over 6000 hours of their time to good causes in their communities as part of Mozilla Service Week . Through one of our engineering volunteers, Aravind Gottipatti, Benetech/Bookshare received an invitation to help them kick-off the week. Betsy Beaumon, Carrie Karnos, Rick Costa and I visited the terrific Mozilla offices in Mountain View last Monday to give the team a big picture view of what Benetech does and present a range of volunteer projects that they could dive into right away. Workstations were set up in their spacious lounge and through the course of the afternoon volunteers swung by to help type in children’s books for our collection (pre-selected books that for various reasons are easier to transcribe than scan). The following Friday a team from Mozilla paid Bookshare a visit and after a brief tour ...

Another exciting milestone has happened with the Bookshare collection. Thanks to tremendous work by our volunteers, our publisher partners, our proofreading partners and our staff, we've added more than 4,000 books in the last two months and broken the 50,000 titles barrier. Now, I sure wasn't expecting us to add books at this rate! We've been adding books at more than 1000 books a month earlier this year, and I think that rate is definitely sustainable. Can't wait to see what happens the rest of 2009 with the incredible book juggernaut we've got going. And, we don't lose sight of the equality we're striving to deliver. Just minutes ago I received an email forwarded from our team from a user in Puerto Rico telling us that our response to her rush request for a book had just helped her pass her final exam. She rained down blessings on the Bookshare team for helping her out. That's why we're all doing this!

President Marc Mauer of the National Federation of the Blind just had an excellent op ed published by the Baltimore Sun entitled Bias against blind book lovers . Mauer does a great job in capturing the advocacy position of the Reading Rights Coalition . This is a case of dueling moral high grounds. The Authors Guild are pressing the cause of authors' rights to make more money (in theory). The Reading Rights Coalition and NFB are advocating for the equal rights of disabled people. How does society choose between competing moral high grounds? I don't know of an algorithm for this, but I do know how people think. And, the Authors Guild is suffering because the NFB and Reading Rights Coalition has done a great job of articulating the differences. My take: Authors Guild: we want to insist that publishers turn off text-to-speech so our authors can make more money over how much they make from the standard text ebook. But, we'd be happy if they charged extra for text-to-speec...

Last year, the National Federation of the Blind took on Amazon.com about the accessibility of their website, which NFB felt at one time had been quite accessible, but which had declined in accessibility. My impression was that this advocacy was linked to the Target department store lawsuit, because Amazon does the technical work behind the Target website, which has been inaccessible. NFB got them to commit to work on accessibility . So, someone came from Amazon.com to speak about this at this years' NFB Convention in Dallas. Craig Woods started by telling the big rocks, gravel, sand, water story, the one where after filling the jar with rocks, there's still room to add gravel, and then sand and finally water. The moral of the story is that if you want to work on your big priorities, you have to get them in your jar first, because otherwise the small stuff will keep you from getting to them. The speech itself was pretty basic: Amazon cares about its customers above all else...

I'm excited about our growing partnership with the American Foundation for the Blind, the leading foundation focused on blindness issues. One thing we just did was to fill in the last few missing titles on AFB's Braillebug Reading Club. The Braillebug web site is dedicated to promoting Braille to students who could benefit from learning Braille. Now, we have all of these recommended children's books for Braille readers on Bookshare.org in excellent quality. Because all blind students in the U.S. now qualify for Bookshare.org, this means that these books can be quickly downloaded into Braille displays or printed out with Braille embossers. We look forward to adding future books to Bookshare.org as new titles are chosen for the Braillebug reading club.

When we submitted our proposal to the competition to provide accessible books to U.S. students with print disabilities, I told my team that if we won an award, I'd cook smoked lobster for the whole company. Today's that day! We're just three weeks into this new world for Benetech. I think we've signed up more schools and students for Bookshare.org in the last three weeks than in the last three years! We're hiring like crazy: we have more than ten job openings posted. We issued our first official press release about the award and immediately had a great article in the San Jose Mercury News. The same article was on the cover of the Palo Alto Daily News with a great picture of Claire O'Brien, our newly promoted Collection Development Manager, scanning a book. 99,999 more books to go! So, as we celebrate this great award, we're also busy thinking about how we will dramatically improve the availability of quality textbooks and education materials to stud...