Blog

There were many over-the-top cultural experiences I took in on my recent visit to the U.A.E., where I headed this past November to represent Bookshare at the 32nd Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF). As Director of Content Acquisition for Benetech’s Global Literacy Program, which operates Bookshare, my key role is to engage with publishers in a deep conversation about the power of digital books to improve the lives of people at a reading disadvantage both here in the U.S. and around the world.

Inside Silicon Valley, a weekly public affairs program on radio station 1590 KLIV in San Jose, CA, featured our CEO, Jim Fruchterman, in a conversation about his journey as a social entrepreneur and Benetech.

Are you focused on planning for success? Good. But are you also planning for failure? You should, because it’s how we fail that sets us up for success, argues David Pablo Cohn. We recently had the pleasure of hosting Pablo at Benetech’s offices, where he shared with us some rules of thumb he’d picked up along the way for failing as well as possible. This was an opportune lesson for the Benetech team, as we recently launched Benetech Labs. In the spirit of new beginnings and New Year’s resolutions, we’d like to share here Pablo’s four rules for (good) failure as a way of life.

Human rights groups face increasingly sophisticated attackers with the ability to exploit their growing digital surface. When a group documenting human rights abuses against the Tibetan community came to us last year with interest in Martus, they brought with them a deep mistrust of their own hard drives. Together we decided to use an implementation method that emphasized security at all stages and selected Tails to be the default environment for their use of Martus. The Martus-on-Tails model is an exciting new venture into human rights defenders’ protection. We look forward to exploring other models and developing this one into a more mature standard.

I’m delighted to share with you today a wonderful success story from our Volunteer Program. UC Santa Cruz students who participated in our volunteer pilot project—proofreading textbooks for our Bookshare collection—have done a fantastic job proofreading over a short period of time three entire textbooks! This means more than 2,300 pages of text and an amazing gift for the 250,000+ Bookshare student members we serve.