Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I recently was invited to give a talk at my alma mater, Caltech. The talk was hosted by the Caltech Y, as well as by the local chapter of NetImpact and the alumni association, as part of their Social Activism Speaker Series (SASS) . I was particularly thrilled that Martin Luther King was an earlier speaker hosted by the Y in the area of social activism! Not that I'll ever be in that league! It's just an honor to be in a talk series where the brochure features MLK. One of the board members from the Y, Gunilla Hastrup, heard me waxing eloquent about why I loved the Y as a student and why I still do. And, I agreed to write up why I am so enthusiastic. The Y used to be part of the YMCA but severed the formal connection long ago. It doesn't have a pool or a gym, but it does provide Caltech students, staff and faculty with a vibrant link to the outside world. Caltech is such an intense place; it's helpful to get some perspective. As a student, I loved Decompression,...

Over the weekend just ended we successfully launched the completely rebuilt Bookshare website. The original Bookshare website and service was created over seven years ago, and has served us well. But, our new Bookshare for Education project with its likely prospect of increasing our student users one hundredfold meant we needed a rebuild. I'm also excited about our new logo! The new features built in are too many for me to list in a short blog post, but our team has prepared a brief on the new Accessibility and Ease of Use features . Big news includes: Many new accessibility features Brand new talking software from HumanWare and Don Johnston High quality text-to-speech Extensive features for schools to manage student memberships, including an easy way for a school to recommend a student gets their own personal membership (their own unlimited use library card) Expanded and enhanced volunteer functions to make adding new books easier Replacing our proprietary compression softwar...

I'm always interested in fresh approaches to social problems. The global climate crisis is one that is engaging a lot of creative brainpower. I've been tracking local researcher Leslie Field and her Ice911 concept for more than a year. It's still in stealth mode, but I got Leslie's permission to blog about it. Leslie was motivated by seeing An Inconvenient Truth to think about a new way to help reduce global warming. What I like about her idea is that it's both simple and clever at the same time. The idea is to cover portions of the Arctic Ocean with removable, reflective covers: sort of an artificial icecap. One of the problems we've seen is the unfortunate feedback loop of loss of polar ice packs , which leads to more open ocean instead of ice cover which leads to more heat absorbed from the sun, which results in more loss of polar ice cover. The panels interlock somewhat alike to a jigsaw, and there's secret sauce and magic in the materials. But, I ...

Today is Louis Braille's 200th birthday, and there's been a great deal of coverage for the inventor of the premier reading system for the blind. The former British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, published a piece for the BBC called Why Braille is brilliant today. The National Federation of the Blind is organizing events around the country to celebrate his birthday and the invention of Braille . It helps blind people all over the world, as this recent sample of Hindi Braille demonstrates. We're very proud at Bookshare.org about our support of Braille. We believe that digital Braille displays combined with Bookshare really make Braille much more practical. What power when you can carry around an entire library of Braille books that weights only two pounds!

Just before the holidays, we had a great visit from Tracy R. Justesen, Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services . Tracy's brief at the U.S. Department of Education includes overseeing OSEP, the people who are funding our Bookshare for Education project to serve every student with a print disability in the United States. Tracy's visit really gave our team a chance to shine. John Glass demonstrated the new version of Victor Reader Soft from HumanWare, one of our key access technology partners. John Crossman demonstrated the completely new version of the Bookshare on-line library, which is currently in the first round of beta tests. Paddy Sullivan, part of our membership team, volunteered to demonstrate the new version of Don Johnston's Read:OutLoud software, which will be available once we launch the new site. Carrie Karnos gave the demonstration to Tracy and Margaret Romer (also from Department of Ed) of the ever-popular book mangler, I mean,...

On my recent visit to Hong Kong, I was able to see the amount of excitement and interest in social entrepreneurism. One had to assume there's a lot going on in China, too, but it's hard to connect with. I just received an update from KK Tse entitled The Most Inspiring Story from the Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship, talking about 1KG More, a social enterprise that implemented Voluntourism: combining backpacking with delivering books and other gifts for rural Chinese children. Their latest venture: Twin books are a pair of selected books for children. If one book is sold in cities, another book will be donated to rural children. The owners of these two books will become a “twin”. Through the twin code in the book, the children in cities can find contact information of rural children on Twin Book’s website and make communication through letters with rural children. The twin book project sold over 2000 fairy story books in 2007 and more than 1000 rural students benefited fro...

We have a partnership with the Worth Trust in Chennai, India, to do data entry for Bookshare.org, funded by the Lavelle Fund. I blogged about it in May: Scanning in Tamil Nadu . Our international Bookshare.org manager, Viji Dilip, recently wrote about making a change in what kind of capital equipment to get Worth Trust to help carry out their work: Strange as it may sound I grew up with hearing this often, "Everyone please save all your files now as the current will be going off in the next five minutes." OK, there were no computers when I was growing up in India but the current going "off" was very common. Sometimes for an hour or two and in summer for several hours at a stretch when the Electricity Board scheduled power cuts for every city . These power cuts could last from anywhere from an hour to three hours in the afternoon depending on when the supervisor at the EB came back from lunch. "There was no current" was our equivalent of "The dog a...