Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Bookshare , Benetech's online library for people who are blind or otherwise print-disabled, is fortunate to have a variety of summer interns and volunteers working in our Palo Alto office this year. Our main focus has been our text book image description project . Our summer volunteers write text book image descriptions, review and revise descriptions, provide technical assistance, and proofread children’s books with new image descriptions. We’re especially grateful for the participation of two blind Bookshare members, who have provided input on how to write the best image descriptions. Volunteers have also helped us prepare for the ACB and NFB summer conferences, and contributed to our marketing, collection development, and international departments. We are sincerely grateful to our enthusiastic and dedicated group of volunteers. Here is more about each one in their own words! Nilofer Chollampat I’m a Natural Science major at U.C. Davis with minors in Education and...

Every week our Bookshare team hears from our Members. I am thrilled to get copied on these emails: it reminds me of why we do here at Benetech! I appreciate that so many of our Members take the time to write and thank our team. Changes often inspire Members to write and it is so helpful to hear about what works (and what doesn't work so we can fix it). The recent upgrades in our Bookshare site and service such as the new audio formats, images, and image descriptions motivated several Members to share their thoughts, and we sought their permission to share those thoughts with you! For example, new Member Annette Moore wrote: the fact that Bookshare offers their books in mp3 format is why I decided to become a Member. I don't have a VR Stream or a Booksense; I just use the NLS digital talking book player. I do have to say the Bookshare TTS voice for the mp3 format is great! I love Christian fiction, and while NLS does have some in that particular genre, Bookshare has so m...

The rise of for-profit social enterprises has been quite exciting. Although I'm firmly on the nonprofit side with Benetech (because we focus on big issues where the market is failing), it's definitely easier to get funded sustainably if you have an exciting and invest-able business plan. Evan Haigler is a social entrepreneur I've known for years. He's made a big difference in the area of clean cook stoves and carbon credits, spinning his nonprofit group ImpactCarbon out of UC Berkeley years ago. Lately Evan's been talking about how to expand their impact even more. He's joined forces with other social entrepreneurs in the field to found UpEnergy , a new for-profit social enterprise that wants to scale the impact of their successful pilot projects. The founding team includes leaders from each of the first three Gold Standard clean cookstove projects (and these projects delivered more than half a million stoves). They are already active in Africa and Latin ...

Benetech has long been a pioneer in providing innovative services to people with print disabilities. This week, Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center has announced the release of an open source web application for creating and editing crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM helps level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers who cannot read traditional books. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format. The DIAGRAM Center team has also created an image data content model which will provide standards to define and enhance the efficacy and interoperability of accessible images as the project evolves. DIAGRAM stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials. Our DIAGRAM ...

I was recently at the Skoll World Forum, probably the best conference in the world for meeting with top social entrepreneurs. As a longtime member of the Skoll community, I prize this week for the opportunity to talk frankly with peers about our biggest mutual challenges. Peer learning is the most valuable opportunity for a field that has no operator's manual -- like social entrepreneurship! The constant theme is raising money for our social enterprises. But not just any money -- we talk about the most difficult money to raise: the unrestricted funding that is the lifeblood for a social entrepreneur. This kind of funding is essential for innovation, for responding to time-critical opportunities, prototyping new ideas and getting them to the point where they are a saleable product to customers and/or issue-focused donors. But, unrestricted funding is far harder to raise, because the donor is investing in the leadership of the organization as opposed to a specific set of deliverab...

Bookshare, Benetech’s pioneering digital library for people with print disabilities, celebrated its 10th birthday last night with a terrific party that was attended by many of our long-time friends and supporters. The event was hosted by Google on its campus in Mountain View, California, which is home to some of the most cutting edge technologists in the world. Betsy Beaumon, Benetech VP and General Manager of Bookshare During the event, our Bookshare staff offered demos of our Bookshare library and our Go Read accessible ebook reader for Android. They also demoed Read2Go, the accessible ebook application for the Apple OS and Route 66 Literacy, Benetech’s online literacy instructional program. During the party we had a surprise video message from Stevie Wonder, a long-time Bookshare member who told us that he is using Read2Go to read accessible books from the Bookshare library. “I can feel it all over, it’s a hit!” said Stevie. Thanks Stevie! We think so too. T.V. Raman (and...

Last October, I had the pleasure and honor to visit the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, to accept on behalf of Benetech the 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation (ESI). The ESI Award recognizes outstanding individuals and organizations whose innovations blend methods from the worlds of business and philanthropy, and that challenge the status quo to create sustainable social value with a potential for large-scale impact. CASE launched the ESI Award in 2009, and Benetech is proud to join the company of past award recipients. CASE is a research and education center that promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact through the adaptation of business expertise. Since its founding in 2002, CASE has been at the forefront of providing thought leadership for the growing field of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is a new field whose actors will all benefit from a systematic searc...