Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Benetech is committed to developing technology for underserved communities that can reap big benefits from improved access to information. So we’re especially proud to announce the launch of Miradi version 3, the enhanced version of our user-friendly environmental conservation software. Miradi gives conservation planners cutting edge tools to design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects. The new Miradi 3 release offers a powerful work planning interface that lets users forecast expenses, develop budgets, and export project data to donor reports. The software also helps conservation teams prioritize environmental threats, develop objectives and actions, and select monitoring indicators to assess the effectiveness of their strategies. Miradi is the first software program designed especially by and for conservation planners based on a common set of environmental metrics. Miradi is a joint venture between Benetech and the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP), a consortium of gl...

At a two-day event at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation on changing an entire movement. The people attending all believe that we have to focus much more on conservation outcomes: are there more tigers? are there more gorillas? Nick Salafsky used the death of George Washington as an example of what happens when you don't use evidence in making decisions. Apparently, when George got sick, one of the early treatments was to bleed him. When that didn't work, they bled him again. And again. And again. By the time they'd removed more than six pints of blood in one day, he died. It wasn't until later that we found that with rare exceptions, bleeding people doesn't work! Measuring outcomes is difficult, measuring activities is easy. But, if we only measure activities, we could find ourselves being "successful" while the species we're trying to protect goes extinct or the biome we're trying to protect loses viability and diversity. The focus is...