Benetech is one of select U.S. nonprofit organizations to receive seed funding under Google.org’s Global Impact Awards program. Google.org has awarded Benetech the seed grant for the development of secure, open technology tools to advance human rights abuse research and action. Benetech will lead a human rights technology and data consortium and advisory committee to devise technical requirements for a comprehensive human rights information platform. It will also develop open source prototypes for testing in the field. This project will serve social justice groups, civil society organizations, journalists, activists, and researchers.
The impact of the SocialCoding4Good global volunteer community is best told through the enhanced capacity of our project partners. Case in point is how SocialCoding4Good-enabled tech volunteerism helped project partner FrontlineSMS improve its product and better serve its users.
Nominet Trust, a United Kingdom leading social tech funder, selected the Martus Project, an initiative of Benetech’s Human Rights program, among this year’s top 100 innovations using technology to drive social change around the world. The curated listed of these leading innovations, known as the Nominet Trust 100 (NT100), appears in the Nominet Trust’s 2014 Social Tech Guide.
Satellite imagery is expensive, but its potential to create social good excites nonprofit technology experts. In a story that reports on the plans of Silicon Valley start-up Planet Labs to bring down the cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos, The Chronicle of Philanthropy quotes our CEO, Jim Fruchterman, on the opportunities that cheaper remote imagery technology could open up for nonprofits.
In the United States, all too many students with disabilities are still denied equal opportunity to engage in the same curriculum as their peers without disabilities because they do not have adequate access to educational materials that are necessary to learn and succeed in school. The good news is that major changes in technology are reforming education, writes CEO Jim Fruchterman in a United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report, The State of the World’s Children 2015.
