Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I'm greatly enjoying the CGI event this week in New York. Many great social entrepreneurs running around along with the world leaders (and of course, Angelina Jolie). I've been taking a fair number of pictures. Clinton has a great talent for making everybody feel like they're important: I liked the way he interacted with Vicky Colbert, the great education social entrepreneur from Colombia.

A great radio story aired today on Public Radio International's show, The World, on Guatemala's civil war records . It talks about National Police Archive in Guatemala, and has a quote from Patrick Ball. Clark Boyd of The World took a team to Guatemala earlier this month, and was there for their big election.

We just launched a major stakeholder communication initiative, at My Benetech. We've partnered with the folks from Papilia to provide user-customization of the information they receive from us. It's a place on our website where our users and supporters can sign up for the information they want. I think of it as being similar to the social networking sites (like FaceBook or LinkedIn) where people have more control on what information gets shared with whom. In this case, we're recognizing that Benetech serves widely differing audiences. Some folks are passionate about literacy and helping people with disabilities, others about human rights, and still others about the environment. So, we now have the ability to sign up for one, two or all of our project areas. It's also part of the professionalization of our communications (which I'm sure long term readers will notice). Telling the story of why technology matters to real people is essential to accomplishing ou...

I'm heading down to Malibu next week to give the keynote for the 'Revolution Through Social Enterprise' Conference at Pepperdine. Should be a lot of fun: it's my first visit to the Pepperdine campus. Speaking at college campuses has to be one of the best parts of my work. Two nights ago, I spoke at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, in a class on social enterprise taught by my buddy Jim Schorr, former CEO of Juma Ventures. Like many other classes in social entrepreneurship, it's way oversubscribed. The amount of enthusiasm on campuses for socially relevant learning is terrific, and gives me great confidence for the future of the movement. Coming up just in the next month, I'm also giving talks at Stanford and Kellogg Business School(at Northwestern), and trying to schedule talks lots of other places in the not so distant future.

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!

My eldest son, Jimmy, and I were able to attend a portion of the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University last week. We were able to hear the elevator pitches of more than a dozen social entrepreneurs from literally all over the world. Oh, and Jimmy's 21 now so we can drink beer together in a public place! Jimmy's quite interested in social entrepreneurship. Long term readers of the Beneblog might remember Jimmy's post from Davos last year, (the most popular Beneblog post I ever or never wrote!) when the Schwab Foundation allowed me to bring him along to their Social Entrepreneur Summit in Switzerland. Jimmy's changed his major to international studies with a focus on social issues: my peer social entrepreneurs got him very excited. I think the GSBI program tackles the exact issue Jimmy noticed in Davos: all these great people doing great things, and the world hardly knows. The team at SCU's Center for Science, Technology, and Society ...

Social capital formation is a hot topic for me. I want to see us have the same kind of positive environment for social ventures as we have in Silicon Valley for high tech ventures (but they have to make a lot of money), where great social ventures are rewarded with better and lower cost capital. An under-used tool for foundations is the program-related investment (PRI). PRIs are supposed to be for mission (program) reasons first and financial return second (although you can make a return). One concern about PRIs that I've seen is the high cost of doing them: you have to spend a lot of time and legal fees structuring the transaction. That's why I was glad to see MicroCredit Enterprises and Silk Adler & Colvin release the Program Related Investment (PRI) Primer and Toolkit . It explains a complicated topic well. Plus, they are encouraging other people to use their materials: In the spirit of partnership, MicroCredit Enterprises offers this Primer and Toolkit into the ...