Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

We have been very lucky to continue to partner more closely with the publishing industry, as a major segment of educational publishers come on board with Bookshare: the university presses. We recently announced partnerships with The University of Chicago Press, the University of California Press and New York University Press, where they will be sending digital files of their books to Bookshare to be made available to people with print disabilities. As the debate rages about the accessibility of ebooks, it's good to know that most publishers are committed to seeing their works reach people with print disabilities. We're delighted to be working with these top university presses to meet this crucial need through Bookshare.

As someone with three kids in college, I'm used to the idea of educational loans. My kids are borrowing money; I'm borrowing money. It's the American way of higher education! Outside the U.S., educational loans are not so common. And, education is the way out of poverty. This weekend, I made my first educational microloan, to Claudia Belén García Royz of Nicaragua, who is studying to be an industrial engineer. This loan was the result of a conversation I had with Kushal Chakrabarti, the founder of the Vittana Foundation . Multiple people had connected me with Kushal, including my brother Tom, who worked at Amazon with Kushal. Kushal described Vittana as "Kiva for educational loans." It makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not alone. Every student so far that has posted a loan need has had willing lenders snap up the offering quickly (in under 30 hours over the weekend). Kushal's challenge is actually finding more microcredit institutions in the deve...

We just hosted Indian publishing legend Mahendra Meghani , who dropped in last week when many of our team were traveling. The following account comes from Pavi Mehta, Bookshare's Volunteer Coordinator, and I wanted to post it! It was a quietly special visit. Meghani came with his two hosts and daughter, and at 86 is still keenly interested in learning how technology can help bring books to the disadvantaged. With Carrie’s help he chopped his latest book (a compilation of Gandhi’s writings) up for the Bookshare collection. His publishing house mainly deals with literature in Gujarati but they do have a handful of books in English that they are more than happy to send to us. Viji [Dilip, Bookshare international manager] has sent over the appropriate paperwork and we’ll follow up on that. This is a guy who as his daughter put it, piled books onto a little vegetable cart and trundled it into the market place so that the common man in small town India would be exposed to the literat...

As the chair of the Social Enterprise Alliance, I have the opportunity to address the annual Summit. I had a blast in New Orleans revving up the crowd about this exciting time for the Social Enterprise Alliance and the movement. Here's the text of my speech: [long post alert] Social Enterprise: Not Business as Usual! Jim Fruchterman Chairman’s Address to the Social Enterprise Alliance 2009 Annual Summit The world’s a mess. I thought that would be news to you. We’ve got a lot of problems. We have a global economic meltdown. We have instability and violence all over the world. And we have this thing called the global climate crisis. It’s kind of daunting. The challenges of today’s world demand innovation because we can’t afford — business as usual. I want to talk to you today about this moment in time, this great opportunity for us. We’re joining together to talk about the new face of business. An approach that puts social issues foremost; a strategy that delivers better resul...

The Bookshare team has been attending the summer conventions of the two major blind consumer groups, the NFB and ACB. We had great user parties, listened to our users and talked to other key players in the accessibility field. We also announced a couple of assistive technology partnerships. The first release was about support for mobile phone use with software developer Code Factory of Spain . It still takes downloading the book to a PC and transferring it to the cell phone, but I'm looking forward to getting rid of that extra step! The second announcement was by Plextor of Japan, about their new ebook player that will play Bookshare books . The device also allows users to record their own audio books. The last item I wanted to highlight was a White House blog post with President Obama hosting a delegation of people who are both deaf and blind . I was just delighted to see this quote from the post: This visit was not and should not be viewed as a sympathetic thing for the Pre...

It was exciting to note the publication of my big article on Benetech in MIT Press' Innovations journal. I just received the PDF and was able to post it on Benetech's site. As many of you know, I'm committed to doing a book (and am holed up at Caltech's Athenaeum this week working on it). This article was my first big step in writing up some of Benetech's history and why we do what we do, and the process of working with the editors gave me a taste of what I'm in for with a book!

Enjoyed my day in Berkeley yesterday at the Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp 2009. They had more than 1000 folks show up to talk about service, nonprofits and social action. I thought Arianna Huffington did a good job as the opening keynoter hitting on the service theme. Announcing All For Good was a big piece of the event, of course. Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook had the tough gig of presenting a lunch keynote outside under a tent in lower Sproul Plaza (mucho noise and people talking). She was much more on Facebook marketing message, but of course that's her role at FB. Lots of enthusiastic FB users in the audience helped make her points. I took a lot of pictures, but not that many turned out. Posted the best 30 or so on Flickr : got some great ones of Steve Wright of the Salesforce Foundation. I enjoyed some of the breakout sessions, although the number of concurrent sessions (often 8 at one time) made it hard to pick. Enjoyed Deb Jospin and Shirley Sagawa discussing the Cha...