Members of our Engineering/ Product/ Project Management / Design teams recently participated in a hack day, where they came up with some valuable proof of concepts for our Human Rights and Global Literacy initiatives and experimented with microcontrollers. Granted, hack days are no panacea for solving the world’s problems. Did we complete the proof of concepts we worked on? Of course not. But did we make great progress on various fronts and are we using what we learned to design our way forward? YES!
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.
Today, December 10th, we’re delighted to join the Silicon Valley United Nations Association in observance of Human Rights Day, which marks this year the 65th anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Tonight, at 6pm, at the Calabazas Branch Library, I’ll be giving a talk for the Silicon Valley United Nations Association about some of the ways in which we at Benetech are working on human rights issues globally and in support of the United Nations. I cannot imagine a more fitting group or day to speak about this subject!
I’m on the hunt for rocket fuel because new social enterprises—ones that five years from now could reinvent a part of the social sector—cost money to identify, to explore and to grow the most promising ones into self-sufficiency. Just like for-profit tech ventures search for angel investors, we need you—the philanthropic investors—to provide the rocket fuel that drives innovation. Are you a social investor? Are you a donor with passion for BIG ideas that can lead to BIG change? Then we have the opportunity for you! This Giving Tuesday, give different. Invest in innovation with Benetech and become part of the creative process that yields disruptive solutions for social good.
At Benetech, we believe that as accessible digital content and applications increasingly become more available, they must also be easily discoverable. That’s exactly what we set out to do through the Accessibility Metadata Project, one of our Benetech Labs projects. Earlier this year, we submitted to Schema.org—an initiative supported by the major search engines—our group proposal for accessibility metadata that would make it widely possible to find online content with accessible features. Today we have big news to share: the Schema.org team has just announced it agreed to adopt the accessibility properties we proposed!
