The impact of the SocialCoding4Good global volunteer community is best told through the enhanced capacity of our project partners. Case in point is how SocialCoding4Good-enabled tech volunteerism helped project partner FrontlineSMS improve its product and better serve its users.
My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. In this update, I’m delighted to be able to share Benetech’s latest efforts to do both. First, I’ll cover our biggest fundraising effort of the year: individual philanthropy is crucial to us; it’s the portion that makes 10X impact possible! Then I’ll share the latest stories on the impact of our tech volunteerism and human rights tech efforts as well our new tech leadership.
Nominet Trust, a United Kingdom leading social tech funder, selected the Martus Project, an initiative of Benetech’s Human Rights program, among this year’s top 100 innovations using technology to drive social change around the world. The curated listed of these leading innovations, known as the Nominet Trust 100 (NT100), appears in the Nominet Trust’s 2014 Social Tech Guide.
Today, International Human Rights Day, the Benetech Human Rights Program is delighted to announce the release of version 5 of the Martus app and the debut of the updated Martus Project website. With these updates, Benetech is taking a leap towards improving the usability of end-to-end, open source encryption and extending its benefits to rights defenders, activists, journalists, citizen reporters, and other organizations and individuals who rely on secure data collection.
Satellite imagery is expensive, but its potential to create social good excites nonprofit technology experts. In a story that reports on the plans of Silicon Valley start-up Planet Labs to bring down the cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos, The Chronicle of Philanthropy quotes our CEO, Jim Fruchterman, on the opportunities that cheaper remote imagery technology could open up for nonprofits.
