Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The Benetech team has just bid goodbye to VP of Engineering Gerardo Capiel, who is moving on to his next adventure. A passionate technology-for-good advocate, Gerardo has made major contributions to Benetech’s social mission since he joined us over four years ago. As we are getting ready to welcome a new VP of Engineering, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Gerardo for his many contributions and their lasting impact on the lives of the people we serve. Gerardo helped Benetech dramatically increase our capacity to benefit larger populations by scaling our services, revamping our innovation process, and establishing a thriving network of industry partners and volunteers. He oversaw the development of numerous products and services that allow us to drive social empowerment through technology across all our programs. He also championed an open source ethos so that our work can be broadly shared (you can view all our open source projects on GitHub ). Gerardo’s contributions related to th...

I greatly enjoy talking to students, and I am now in Ottawa, Canada, just having spoken to an incredible group of students, Engineers Without Borders Canada . Now, I had heard of EWB before, but I hadn't grasped how large, sophisticated and ambitious an organization this is! I'm at the annual Canadian EWB conference (each of the EWB country groups is independent of the other), and there are hundreds and hundreds of students here. Mainly engineering students, but as EWB Canada has grown and matured, they've increased the size of their umbrella and welcome non-engineering students. Oh, and at least half of the engineering students here are women. Hint to the profession: if you link engineering to helping people rather than gadgets, women seem to be more interested! Dr. Pamela Hartigan, head of the Skoll Centre at Oxford University's Said Business School, noted in her keynote that EWB was the largest single source of Skoll Scholars at Oxford. That made me realize how im...