Blog

Over the past three months, we’ve had the pleasure of working with three very talented students as a part of Google Summer of Code 2013. This is our second consecutive summer partnering with this amazing global program, which offers student developers stipends to write code for open source software projects. What’s so great about the program is that not only do the students get to work on real world, open source software development with a mentor, but the projects that participate benefit greatly from the new talent, ideas and collaboration. This summer, our students have been working on three pretty cool projects, contributing code that extends the functionality of tools and capabilities we provide as part of our Bookshare initiative.

As accessible materials increasingly become more available, we must ensure that users can easily discover this accessible content. It’s time to elevate the discussion about the importance of the discoverability of accessible materials. Help us make sure our panel is part of SXSW 2014! Go to the SXSW PanelPicker and vote for Discovering Accessible Learning Resources. PanelPicker closes tomorrow, Friday, September 6, so please VOTE NOW.

Today we’d like to introduce you to our second cohort of interns: Javier Guzman and Marcos Rodriguez. They, too, were wonderful additions to the Benetech community. As in the first session of our Internship Program, Javier and Marcos participated in various company meetings, brown bag lunches and other learning opportunities. They were also extremely helpful in assisting Bookshare with daily tasks, including proofreading dozens of student-requested picture books and updating metadata in Spanish, which allowed us to process and add many new titles to our Spanish collection.

Gerardo Capiel, Benetech’s VP of Engineering, and I were here in San Bernardino, Paraguay, as representatives of Benetech Labs. We were invited by the leaders of Fundación Avina to investigate how technology could be leveraged to help organizations provide essential services, like clean water and sanitation, to their communities in more efficient ways. It was the perfect place to do so, as the conference brought together community leaders and water managers to discuss shared concerns about the future of these services across rural Latin America.

Years of working closely with our Martus users have taught us that the projects our users pursue and the outcomes they are working towards can vary widely. In addition to large nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), our users include independent activists, local coalitions, members of small NGOs and many others. There is an incredible diversity within the Martus user community and wide spectrum of ways in which it uses Martus.