Benetech

enetech has announced the addition of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yogen Dalal to its Board of Directors. Dalal is an engineer and former managing partner at venture capital firm Mayfield Fund. Over the last 20 years he has invested in the communications, enterprise software, and Internet consumer and infrastructure sectors. “Yogen Dalal will provide Benetech with invaluable guidance as we strengthen our leadership role at the intersection of the technology and social change sectors,” says Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman.

In the light of the recent political reforms in Burma, for the first time, our partners at the Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma (ND-Burma) felt comfortable planning a comprehensive Martus training in Rangoon. In late November 2013, jointly with ND-Burma, our team co-led a training for seven human rights groups issues such as digital security tools and methods, approaches to documentation, and, of course, a deep training on using Martus. We are honored to have been able to support ND-Burma member organizations at this memorable training and are deeply grateful for their continued partnership.

I’m thrilled to announce that Benetech has filled two key positions: Nadine Apelian Dobbs as Communications Director and Elaine Wallace as General Counsel. I think they will both make big contributions to building our ability to deliver greater impact in the technology-for-good field. We are incredibly fortunate and excited to have both Nadine and Elaine joining Benetech!

Members of our Engineering/ Product/ Project Management / Design teams recently participated in a hack day, where they came up with some valuable proof of concepts for our Human Rights and Global Literacy initiatives and experimented with microcontrollers. Granted, hack days are no panacea for solving the world’s problems. Did we complete the proof of concepts we worked on? Of course not. But did we make great progress on various fronts and are we using what we learned to design our way forward? YES!

Leading foreign policy magazine Foreign Affairs posted a story about the Syrian civil war citing Benetech’s United Nations report of conflict-related killings in Syria. The story’s author, David Kaye, notes that while well-respected human rights groups have shown the regime of Bashar al-Assad “to be responsible for attacks directed against civilians, torture of prisoners, summary executions, and the use of chemical weapons, among other crimes,” it is Benetech’s “detailed report last January for the UN that identified nearly 60,000 individual killings, a number that now likely exceeds 100,000.”