Benetech

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.

Benetech is a nonprofit that receives federal funding in support of its work, and therefore our Finance team has had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the upcoming changes to federal award guidelines that will take effect in December. In this post, I’d like to share key issues we’ve learned, with the hope that our nonprofit peers find this account useful. We believe that it’s worth learning more about these changes now rather than being surprised later—and that it’s well worth aiming for a special status that will save you money on your audits.

While new technologies can play a critical role in defending human rights, they can also create unforeseen risks for human rights groups and activists. On October 30, 2014, Benetech Vice President of Human Rights Enrique Piracés joined fellow panelists Iain Levine, Deputy Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS, and Andrew Rasiej, Founder of Personal Democracy Media and the Personal Democracy Forum, in a discussion of key issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. You can watch the complete webcast on Livestream.

Benetech’s work is made possible thanks to the generosity of our supporters. To continue to provide our services, and to explore new ways in which targeted technological applications could address unmet needs of disadvantaged communities, we definitely need your help. Please join us in the Skoll Foundation’s second annual Skoll Social Entrepreneurs Challenge—a fundraising campaign committed to strengthening the capacity of organizations like ours to accelerate impact on some of the most critical issues of our time. The Challenge launched on October 27 and runs through December 5th.

Collection and archival of sensitive information are core to humanitarian and social justice practices, but all too often security and privacy protections are neglected in such efforts. Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman sat down with WBEZ Chicago’s Worldview guest host Alexandra Salomon for a conversation about the power of open source technology in strengthening privacy and human rights, and about Benetech’s social impact work.