Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

One of the things I often talk about in my public speaking is the continuum that goes from pure profit orientation to pure charity. Most social entrepreneurs I know operate somewhere in between, and for good reasons. Charity is an important and good thing, but charity can be a powerful negative force when misapplied. My example of this is the abusive use of foreign aid in ways that support the giver and damage the recipient. A book I read that made a big impression was "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren, who described how U.S. food aid played a big role in the destruction of Somalia couple of decades ago (helping lead to the continuing problems of today). Steve Cisler heard me mention this book recently and sent me a spot-on article from the Observer, How America is betraying the hungry children of Africa. The article shows how we manage to damage agricultural economies and the sustainability of countries with food aid, this time in Malawi. Why are we shipping many t...

Just published my first op ed on the raising the floor concept yesterday in the Sacramento Bee, Everyone deserves access to technology, online world , co-authored with Prof. Gregg Vanderheiden. This op ed was derived from remarks I made to the California Emerging Technology Fund's Roundtable recently. I want to sound the call for the technology community to get behind raising the floor for everybody around the planet. It's something within our power, and it will bring out the best in our community. The opening paragraphs are excerpted below: As technology races ahead at an ever-increasing pace, more and more of society's activities are moving into an online digital world that requires unfettered access. Although many of us may feel like we're falling behind technologically, large groups of Californians face barriers that block their access to the online world. People with disabilities, seniors, the poor and those without strong reading skills are facing ever-increas...

Santa Clara University invited Bill Coleman (founder of BEA and Cassatt), Jeff Miller (VC at Redpoint Ventures) and me to speak recently on the topic of "Working to Change the World." It was a great hour of conversation around social change and the tech community's role. The show will be broadcast on Thursday, June 14th, on KLIV radio, 1590 AM in the Bay Area, and is also available as a video on the STS (Center for Science, Technology & Society) website . Some excerpts from the event, courtesy of STS: “Here in Silicon Valley, we control immense wealth, immense intellectual property. We have connections, we understand how to solve problems and the world needs our involvement. My message is that the barrier to getting involved is much lower than you may think,” Fruchterman said in his opening comments. “The University right here is putting together the ingredients. We have some of the best minds and mentors… we have the programs started. The opportunity is for us to ...

Benetech has been seeing incredible growth in our Martus projects over the last year! We now have over 60,000 bulletins which have been backed up to secure Martus servers by over 1000 users across the world. This represents 400% growth over last year. This tremendous growth is due in large part to the continued use of Martus by our partners working in Guatemala with the National Police Archive, and projects gathering data about Burma, Iraq and the Philippines. Because Martus is free and open source software that does not require users to register with Benetech, these educated estimates of users are almost certainly underreported. As the number of organizations and users of Martus grows, it has become increasingly important for us to support product enhancements to meet the needs of these significant user groups. We just released Martus 3.1 which focused on performance enhancements for our large users. It includes a feature to notify head quarters accounts when there are new field ...

Although I have stayed in town pretty much this month, I've done a ton of stuff around the area. The NetSquared conference just wrapped up, and it was a lot of fun. Networking with people I know is always great, and I found the premise of this year's program different and exciting. Netsquared had picked 21 projects to run through two days of pitches concluding with voting from the attendees. The top group won a prize of $25,000, and that was Maplight, a group that connects political donations to legislative votes. Freecycle and Miro were the runners up. I love Freecycle! Four million items traded for free each month around the globe. I think they could use more funding, too. I took lots of pictures, and they are posted on Flickr as the NetSquared collection .

We've been a Google Grant partner for years. This is a program that I think many more nonprofits need to take advantage of. The problem of many (most) social sector organizations is outreach (marketing, in business-speak). Because of a lack of budget for marketing, it's hard for potential clients to find out about the services that are available to them. Google advertising is highly tuned. If someone is searching on the terms "Books blind," they are looking for something like Bookshare.org. It's an incredibly effective ad for us on Google: a clickthrough rate on the order of 5%. This means that one out of twenty people who see the ad displayed choose to go to Bookshare.org via the ad link. The deal behind the Google Grant program is that Google absorbs the advertising costs. So, if that ad click would normally cost $1, it costs Benetech $0. It's a great deal! Of course, one of Google's key precepts is that lousy ads don't get served. So, yo...

We just did a site upgrade on Bookshare.org : our third in as many months. Among the dozens of improvements in this update are two that I'm particularly jazzed about. The first is the initial international changes as we take Bookshare.org global. Users with disabilities outside the U.S. can easily see which books have global permissions, which are required when we can't rely on our copyright exemption (which only works inside the U.S.). Now that it's easy to see which books are available, we need to ensure that we add many more books with these permissions. Crucial first steps on the road to taking this service global! The second one may not sound like a big deal, but we greatly simplified the process of signing up for Bookshare.org for schools. This is crucial as we continue to rapidly expand into serving students. It used to take lots of handholding from Susie Mckinnon, our Bookshare.org sales manager, for schools to sign up. Now I'm getting delighted emails fr...