Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

[Note: this is part one of seven posts on the Benetech Truths .] The world has big problems. We need fresh, original solutions that are better than the status quo. Technology has revolutionized business, but bringing those breakthrough developments to government, education and the nonprofit sectors can take 5, 10, even 15 years. It doesn’t have to be that way. We’re convinced that there are many innovative social applications of technology could make a 5X or a 10X or even a 15X improvement over status quo solutions. At Benetech, our team is committed to using technology to drive positive social change. We want to see technology serve much more of humanity than just the richest ten percent. We use technology to create products and projects that serve humanity where the market will fail to go because they offer modest financial returns. To create these breakthrough solutions, our team uses its skills to build upon the incredible talents and productivity of the larger tech community. We...

Elaina Todd, an environmental planner who develops social marketing campaigns with the nonprofit conservation group Rare, is profiled in our most recent case study for Benetech’s Miradi software. Miradi, is used by nature conservation practitioners around the world to design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects. The free and open source software, which is a joint venture between Benetech and the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) , guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation. Elaina is using Miradi to develop and monitor her “Pride” campaign which addresses the social and economic factors that create environmental threats to Guam’s coral reefs. Rare’s Pride campaigns are two-year marketing initiatives that shift the attitudes and behaviors of people living near endangered areas to engage them in conservation efforts. Rare has embedded core Miradi functions into their standardized marketin...

Two or three times a year, I publish a president's update for Benetech. This latest one spotlights the many great interns, associates and fellows that are or were working for Benetech over this summer and into this year. Summer 2009 Our growth over the last year has been so phenomenal that I wanted to use this summer update to highlight some of the great people working for Benetech: our interns, summer associates and fellows. Each one of these terrific people has committed to spending anywhere from a month to a year helping Benetech with his or her skills and passion. Here are some of their stories: Aleda Schaf fer A student at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, Aleda Schaffer has worked as an American Sign Language Interpreter in Washington, DC, Alaska and Boston. She joined Benetech so she could learn more about Bookshare and how it is making books and periodicals more accessible to people with print disabilities. She also loves the fact that Benetec...

One day last month we were shocked to discover all the street trees on our quaint downtown street had been chopped down. Clearcut. To be honest, most of us probably never took much notice of the 63 mature holly oaks. They were just part of the landscape. Until they were gone. Suddenly the world seemed a little harsher. No more trees. No more shade. No more leafy beauty. Our hot summer (and autumn!) days became a little hotter. Our local version of accelerated climate change. Now, we’re not expecting the world to cry crocodile tears for us. The city made a mistake. But let’s put it in perspective. We live in one of the most comfortable cities in the country, if not the world. Rather, the incident demonstrated just how affected we are by something as simple as a chopped down tree (some citizens were so angry they threatened city officials). If a few dozen dead trees could cause so much grief, imagine living in a place where whole forests are being clearcut, coral reefs bleached, or en...

We're piloting our new Miradi.org website, which is our environmental project management software. Miradi (the new name of what we used to call the e-Adaptive Management software) has been in beta test for a while and we've gotten great feedback from all over the world from environmental practitioners. We've just put Google Analytics on the site, and are playing with it. So, feel free to visit and check it out. Google Grants (Google.org) also did a lot of work on our Google Adwords, and searching for "Miradi" on Google brings up our ad, too. We had a summer MBA intern from Haas Business School (at UC Berkeley), Jeff Rauenhorst, and he wrote a draft launch plan which we're just putting the finishing touches on. Next step is to review it with our partners in developing Miradi: groups like The Nature Conservancy, WCS and WWF. So, we're rolling forward towards getting version 1 out there!

Our new environmental project management software, Miradi , just went into its beta testing. Our core beta testers are drawn from the Conservation Measures Partnership , coalition of the leading biodiversity groups (such as The Nature Conservancy, WWF and WCS). I thought that meant a small beta test, but it turns out that we already have testers registered from 16 different countries on 6 different continents! Since we're designing this software for field people, and these groups have projects all over the world, it's just to be expected. Miradi is an exciting project: I'm looking forward to making steady upgrades to the software this year. We're using an agile development mechanism, which means that we are responding quickly to user feedback and releasing new versions of the software several times a month. Later this year we should have a publicly available version 1 of the product!