Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Watching policeman rough up a taxi driver. Second and final delayed blog posting from Tunis. Original post from Nov 18, 2005: The WSIS Summit continues to be fascinating. In a recent post, I alluded to human rights activists getting beat up. Yesterday I had a personal experience with the police presence. I took a taxi back to the conference after a brief visit to Carthage for lunch. The taxi had to stop a few hundred meters short of the center at a police roadblock. I leaned out to ask the policemen if we could go through, but they told me I had to walk. As I was having this brief exchange, a taxi right behind us honked his horn at my taxi. Bad idea. The policeman ordered the second taxi driver (not my taxi driver, the honking one) out of his taxi and pushed him roughly to the back of his taxi, yelling at him. He yelled back. One policeman started slapping him in the face and hit him four or five times. By this time, the neighbors are all out in the street watching this. Ano...

Tunisia is very interesting this week! The WSIS conference is going on, human rights activists are getting beaten up, and we're talking about how information technology can help build a better world. I gave my talk here on Tuesday, entitled: Building a Global Library for People with Print Disabilities. It went well: many passionate and interesting people from the disabilities movement are here and we are definitely brainstorming ways to join our efforts. A tech guy from Egypt was the standout moment for me so far. I was attending a session organized by the library association, IFLA, and he got up and talked about how Egypt does not have a culture of reading. His point was the 5 million Internet users in Egypt are the people who do read. His complaint: the Web is dominated by extremist content. No publishers get why electronic media is important, and their absence is an acute problem. Makes me think that a great investment in civil society is buying the electronic rights to b...

The Tech Awards yesterday were a blast. The Mercury News ran a great story and quoted Peggy Gibbs, one of our execs: Old problems, new solutions : The Tech Museum Awards also provide a venue for many local foundations and non-profits to seek out new ideas and partners. "One of the reasons we're here is to make sure we're continuously collaborating," said Peggy Gibbs, vice president of business development for Benetech, a Palo Alto non-profit that looks for ways technology can help solve the problems of disadvantaged communities. Benetech is a past finalist for the Tech Museum Awards. Mr. Global X (aka someone from the Skoll Foundation) mobile blogged me while I was talking to the Human Rights in China folks, Sharon Hom and Shirley Hom, who were honored as Laureates last night. The Tech Awards are always inspiring, and it was cool to realize that I'm already in personal touch with many of the honorees. It's great to be reminded that there have already been ...

Thursday is World Usability Day, and I'll be giving a on-line session entitled Technology Social Entrepreneurship and Accessibility of Web Services at 20:10 GMT, or 12:10pm PST. I never have done such an event, so I'm looking forward to trying it out!

Recently we asked for some of the thousands of people with disabilities using Bookshare.org to share how it has helped them. These thoughts from Chancey Fleet were particularly eloquent and I wanted to share it with you all. For most students, the freshman year of college is a time for discovering intellectual strength, getting behind a cause or two, and exchanging rapid-fire theories on life, the universe and everything at 3 AM when you should be writing the paper that's due at 9. As a blind freshman, I managed to do all those things, but I always came up against one immense barrier: I couldn't just pick up a book and read it. I got my textbooks on tape, and read them too, when the narrator didn't put me to sleep. I took pathetic notes; you can't write in a tape's margins. I developed a trademark nod-and-smile for anyone who tried to recommend a book to me, because with my friends reading such a variety of interesting things, and the Library of Congress only produ...

I came to Amsterdam yesterday to attend a summit meeting of open source foundations. It was fascinating for me, as I realize this is yet another vibrant and growing community of social enterprises. There seem to be dozens of these groups, each built around one or more open source software project. Common threads included: - Volunteers contributing to the creation of the software, generally organized around a meritocracy - Corporate support in the form of explicit sponsorships and/or paying corporate employees to work on the projects - Nonprofit status, reflecting the social nature of the community - Financial tensions, as the foundations themselves grapple with earned income and sustainability while interacting with corporate sponsors - And, of course, free or open source licenses to the software being created The majority of groups at the summit were from Europe or were international groups with significant European leadership. Yet, the social enterprise issues were similar to the o...

Benetech helps drive indictment of a former dictator. Our team has contributed critical information that has helped Human Rights Watch with its campaign to bring the former dictator of Chad to justice. This is a great example of the power of information technology to advance the cause of victims of gross human rights abuses. On September 27, 2005 a Belgian judge issued an international arrest warrant charging Hissène Habré with atrocities during his 1982-90 rule. Hissène Habré's rule over the former French colony of Chad from 1982 to 1990 was marked by numerous and credible allegations of systematic torture and crimes against humanity. We have just put up a new page about how Benetech's Human Rights team has analyzed secret police documents discovered by a Human Rights Watch field effort, with much more on this important effort. Be sure to check it out if you're interested in seeing how IT can help with the pursuit of justice for human rights victims.