Benetech

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.

Today, #GivingTuesday, is all about giving back to support causes that make the world better, and volunteering time and talent can be a great way to do that. If you are looking for technical skills-based volunteer opportunities with real, lasting impact and active learning though service, then we, at Benetech, invite you to join a growing global community of technical contributors—software designers, developers, product managers, translators, technical writers, quality assurance engineers, and more—who make a difference by volunteering with our SocialCoding4Good initiative.

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.

In a guest post published on the blog of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Society on Social Implications of Technology, CEO Jim Fruchterman highlights four general principles that guide Benetech in developing humanitarian technology applications.

I’m delighted to announce that the Benetech team is celebrating a new milestone: we have successfully exited our environment software enterprise, Miradi, and turned continued management and maintenance of this open source software tool to the conservation community. Miradi has grown to a place where it can be self-sufficient and managed independently by the conservation community. Benetech’s commitment to open source made this transition easy.