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.
In a guest post published on the blog of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Society on Social Implications of Technology, CEO Jim Fruchterman highlights four general principles that guide Benetech in developing humanitarian technology applications.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that the United States is negotiating with eleven other countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, has raised significant concerns about risks to fundamental rights of the world’s citizens. In a story that examines the risk of private data flow within the countries that are negotiating the TPP, Mexican weekly news magazine Proceso cites Benetech VP of Human Rights, Enrique Piracés, on the implications of the TPP for human rights groups and other vulnerable communities.
While new technologies can play a critical role in defending human rights, they can also create unforeseen risks for human rights groups and activists. On October 30, 2014, Benetech Vice President of Human Rights Enrique Piracés joined fellow panelists Iain Levine, Deputy Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS, and Andrew Rasiej, Founder of Personal Democracy Media and the Personal Democracy Forum, in a discussion of key issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. You can watch the complete webcast on Livestream.
Benetech’s work is made possible thanks to the generosity of our supporters. To continue to provide our services, and to explore new ways in which targeted technological applications could address unmet needs of disadvantaged communities, we definitely need your help. Please join us in the Skoll Foundation’s second annual Skoll Social Entrepreneurs Challenge—a fundraising campaign committed to strengthening the capacity of organizations like ours to accelerate impact on some of the most critical issues of our time. The Challenge launched on October 27 and runs through December 5th.
