One of the strengths of the open source community is its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on pressing problems, notes online magazine Opensource.com, highlighting Martus—Benetech’s free, secure human rights information management tool—among select open source projects impacting the lives of at-risk communities around the world.
In a guest post published on the blog of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Society on Social Implications of Technology, CEO Jim Fruchterman highlights four general principles that guide Benetech in developing humanitarian technology applications.
I’m delighted to announce that the Benetech team is celebrating a new milestone: we have successfully exited our environment software enterprise, Miradi, and turned continued management and maintenance of this open source software tool to the conservation community. Miradi has grown to a place where it can be self-sufficient and managed independently by the conservation community. Benetech’s commitment to open source made this transition easy.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that the United States is negotiating with eleven other countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, has raised significant concerns about risks to fundamental rights of the world’s citizens. In a story that examines the risk of private data flow within the countries that are negotiating the TPP, Mexican weekly news magazine Proceso cites Benetech VP of Human Rights, Enrique Piracés, on the implications of the TPP for human rights groups and other vulnerable communities.
I decided to help increase the Bookshare collection by financially supporting the purchase, processing, and proofing of books that are requested by members and that are not covered by grants or otherwise made available directly as digital files by Bookshare publisher partners. If one person wants that book, that’s good enough for me. It’s about each individual member being able to read exactly what he or she wants. Today. Right now, by immediate download. Now that’s a good thing!
