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.
Collection and archival of sensitive information are core to humanitarian and social justice practices, but all too often security and privacy protections are neglected in such efforts. Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman sat down with WBEZ Chicago’s Worldview guest host Alexandra Salomon for a conversation about the power of open source technology in strengthening privacy and human rights, and about Benetech’s social impact work.
This summer, for the third consecutive year, we partnered with Google Summer of Code. We had the pleasure of working with computer science student Joe Maag, who helped create an iOS app that aids the transcription of (inaccessible) math images into readable and accessible math notations, to utilize Benetech’s MathML Cloud tool and advance math accessibility for all.
The Benetech team has just bid goodbye to VP of Engineering Gerardo Capiel, who is moving on to his next adventure. A passionate technology-for-good advocate, Gerardo has made major contributions to Benetech’s social mission since he joined us over four years ago. As we are getting ready to welcome a new VP of Engineering, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Gerardo for his many contributions and their lasting impact on the lives of the people we serve.
Adopting an open source philosophy has proven to be quite effective when furthering technology-for-good, notes online magazine Opensource.com in an interview with Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman. Fruchterman goes on to describe the open source tools Benetech builds; clarifies why it is important that cybersecurity tools in particular are open; explains how Benetech’s culture of “open” shapes its product development as well as broadly serves its social mission; and reflects on the reasons why the open source ethos is well suited for creating social impact.
