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.
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.
At the heart of Silicon Valley—where the focus is all about things like enterprise hardware and software, consumer apps, digital advertising, and monetization of data, gaming, and entertainment—Benetech is an outlier, argues Mozilla’s new online magazine The Open Standard in an interview with CEO Jim Fruchterman and VP of Global Literacy Betsy Beaumon. In a story titled “Open Source for the Global Good, From Silicon Valley,” author Caleb Garling sits down with Fruchterman and Beaumon to talk about Benetech’s model of “coding for global change” with open source solutions.
How do you bridge the breakthroughs of Silicon Valley with unmet social needs? Financial magazine Barron’s highlights this question in a story about CEO Jim Fruchterman, his founding of Benetech, the organization’s social enterprise business model, and the impact of its work on the lives of marginalized communities.
Amnesty International’s Christoph Koettl discusses the unique opportunities and pitfalls presented by the decentralized, real-time exposure of human rights violations on YouTube. On PBS’ MediaShift blog, Koettl cites Benetech’s Mobile Martus app among the top human rights tools that collect relevant data and securely store that information.
