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.
My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. In this update, I’m delighted to be able to share Benetech’s latest efforts to do both. First, I’ll cover our biggest fundraising effort of the year: individual philanthropy is crucial to us; it’s the portion that makes 10X impact possible! Then I’ll share the latest stories on the impact of our tech volunteerism and human rights tech efforts as well our new tech leadership.
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.
