Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

One of the reasons I started the Beneblog more than ten years ago (!) was to keep the Benetech team in the loop. As someone who travels roughly half the time, it’s important to provide some insight into what’s going on, especially since these meetings often influence where Benetech goes with our efforts. So, this is an in-depth report on the two days I just spent at the end of last week in Geneva. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I didn’t have time to write a short blog post, so I wrote a long one. This is totally the “how sausage and law are made” view, so don’t read this unless you want to know more about global accessibility in detail! The context We’ve been supporting the World Blind Union and other groups in the pursuit of a Treaty for the Visually Impaired for the last five or six years. The nexus for this work is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency that deals with such matters. The Marrakesh Treaty was signed last year, and now the e...

Guest Beneblog by  Betsy Beaumon, VP and General Manager, Benetech’s Global Literacy Program. Betsy Beaumon I recently had the honor to speak at the first-ever Braille Summit , hosted on June 19-21, 2013 by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Perkins School for the Blind. With the goal of promoting braille literacy, this landmark meeting brought together braille experts from around the world to Perkins’ campus in Watertown, Massachusetts. My biggest takeaway from the summit: the time could not be more urgent, and more hopeful, for the future of braille and the prospects of those who need it. That’s why braille is an important focus for us in Benetech’s Global Literacy Program — we know that we must keep braille relevant and make it more available. One of the biggest reasons is that among people who are blind, braille literacy has been linked with higher education levels, higher likelihood of employment and higher income. Accor...

Statement of Benetech to the 22nd Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at the World Intellectual Property Organization June 15, 2011, Geneva, Switzerland • Greetings from California’s Silicon Valley! I’m a high tech engineer and the founder of Benetech, one of Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit technology companies, dedicated to seeing that the benefits of technology help all of humanity, not just the richest 10% • As a nonprofit charity, we focus on areas of market failure, where regular for-profit companies have decided that the market opportunity for a given product is not large enough • One of our best-known programs is the Bookshare library, the largest online library of accessible books in the world, a library dedicated to serving the one or two percent of the population with a severe print disability • Since I last spoke to this body less than one year ago at SCCR20, the Bookshare library has grown from serving 100,000 people with print disabilities...

Statement of Benetech to the 20th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at the World Intellectual Property Organization June 23, 2010, Geneva, Switzerland • My nonprofit organization, Benetech, operates Bookshare, the largest online library for people with print disabilities, with the mission of bringing accessible books to all people with print disabilities around the world • We have roughly 100,000 members in the U.S. with print disabilities, with more than 70,000 copyrighted works in our library, the majority of which have been created under the US copyright exception by volunteers, mainly people with disabilities themselves, helping each other. • At Bookshare, we have been very sensitive to the complaints of blind and print disabled people around the world, feeling that they have been unfairly denied access to our extensive collection o My explanation that it’s simply copyright law doesn’t make them feel any better • We would like a binding instrument so...

Great article on Tim O'Reilly in the Los Angeles Times . From the story: He is urging young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making some of the sillier software that lets Facebook users throw virtual sheep at their friends or download virtual beer on iPhones, and instead start making a real difference in the world. He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do. I think this is awesome. We need a movement to form that is much bigger than Gates/Omidyar/Skoll (and Benetech!). The creative brains in the Valley have a lot to offer when they are motivated. Tim is the kind of person that holds immense influence because of his track record for spotting new trends. We're huge O'Reilly fans: Tim has always been socially oriented and more than four years ago gave Bookshare.org a license to distribute all of his books to disabled people around the world. By taking that leadership position (and not suffering any arrows in the back for helping us...