Silicon Valley technology nonprofit Benetech today announced the appointments of Betsy Beaumon as president and Mark Roberts as chief operating officer. Founder Jim Fruchterman continues as Benetech’s chief executive officer, evangelizing Benetech and advancing the technology-for-good field. The goal of the senior appointments is to increase Benetech’s social impact at scale and its capacity to create new social enterprises that use technology to deliver social good.
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.
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.
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.
Information technology organizations seeking to redefine the idea of service in the digital age can learn from Benetech and CEO Jim Fruchterman, argues business and technology magazine CIO Insight. In a story titled “Creating the IT Organization of the Future,” author Charles Araujo highlights Benetech’s social enterprise business model and names Fruchterman a “Digital Renaissance Man.”
