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.
Somehow nearly six months have passed since our last-minute decision to attend the Taproot Foundation Global Pro Bono Summit. “Sure,” I thought, “what’s another 36-hour trip to New York and back?” In retrospect, I can’t believe we even gave it a second thought.
SocialCoding4Good began with the idea of building a sort of Match.com for tech volunteerism — an algorithmic platform that would match individual software developers to nonprofit organizations that were building open source software for socially good causes. Everything would be automated, everyone would get what they needed and our idea would help change the world! At the time of inception, venturing into the world of corporate social responsibility was not even on our roadmap. The problem: our idea wouldn’t address the real challenge…
Computerworld UK magazine, known as the “Voice of IT Management,” published an article about evaluating open source projects and featured Benetech’s SocialCoding4Good initiative.
Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2013, an annual industry forecast written by leading philanthropy scholar Lucy Bernholz about the new social economy, listed Benetech’s SocialCoding4Good initiative among “big shifts that matter” in the field. Bernholz cites SocialCoding4Good as a project demonstrating how a “digital infrastructure” is emerging for the new social economy – private capital used […]
