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Today, #GivingTuesday, is all about giving back to support causes that make the world better, and volunteering time and talent can be a great way to do that. If you are looking for technical skills-based volunteer opportunities with real, lasting impact and active learning though service, then we, at Benetech, invite you to join a growing global community of technical contributors—software designers, developers, product managers, translators, technical writers, quality assurance engineers, and more—who make a difference by volunteering with our SocialCoding4Good initiative.

Thank you to our thriving Bookshare community for everything you have done to to enable us to accomplish together tremendous achievements over the past year. As we look forward to 2015, we know that much work remains to be done. This giving season, you may be receiving communications from our team with an appeal for financially supporting Bookshare. Please take a look and give whatever you can to allow us to continue these efforts and do even more, for more people. Thank you in advance for your support.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Google Research Scientist, T.V. Raman, for a conversation about tech volunteerism, the social impact of open source technology, the future of accessibility, and more. Following are highlights from our conversation: I’m wondering how you would introduce yourself to a community of people interested in harnessing the power […]

In the United States, all too many students with disabilities are still denied equal opportunity to engage in the same curriculum as their peers without disabilities because they do not have adequate access to educational materials that are necessary to learn and succeed in school. The good news is that major changes in technology are reforming education, writes CEO Jim Fruchterman in a United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report, The State of the World’s Children 2015.

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.