Benetech :: About Benetech :: President's Update Archives

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

July 2001

Benetech is charging forward with its plans to expand the application of technology to major social needs. Our focus is now on fund raising for this expansion and successfully launching our Bookshare.org and Martus projects in the next twelve months. We moved significantly towards our goals during the last quarter, as evidenced by:

Hiring the new manager of the Bookshare.org team
Creation of the Bookshare.org pre-launch web site: www.bookshare.org
Initiation of Martus software development
Approval by the IRS of our expanded mission

With the IRS approval, our primary fund raising goal is to secure $2 million to fully fund the first three years of the Martus Project. We have already begun to receive commitments from the high technology community and positive initial feedback from foundations we have approached.

Bookshare.org Progress

Bookshare.org is one of Benetech’s primary projects: an online community that enables people with visual and other print disabilities to legally share scanned books. Our major milestone was hiring a talented manager for the Bookshare.org project:

Alison Lingane, Bookshare.org Senior Product Manager, holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and has extensive experience in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Alison is responsible for both the development and marketing of the Bookshare.org online community, as well as the operations side of creating what will eventually become one of the world’s largest collections of digital books.

Since Alison’s arrival, we’ve seen dramatic progress towards the launch of Bookshare.org. The server development is now more than 85% complete. The Association of American Publishers has reviewed our beta test agreement, and we’ve signed up our initial testers. The pre-launch Bookshare.org website is now up, with extensive information for potential members and volunteers, and an opportunity to sign up to receive our monthly e-newsletter for launch updates. Eddie Garcia, a talented veteran of HP and a very innovative dot.com, has joined us to create our volunteer program before entering the Stanford MBA program this fall. The focus of our efforts has now shifted from creating technology to developing the book collection. Our biggest challenge is achieving critical mass in our collection before the launch of the service. We have already received more than 10,000 digital books donated by volunteers, and that’s just through informal channels. You can find out more by visiting www.bookshare.org.

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Martus Human Rights Technology

In the last six months, we have met with representatives of several dozen organizations in five countries, representing human rights, women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights. Martus tools have a wide variety of potential applications – from documenting international human rights abuses, to monitoring domestic violence offenders within the state of California, to tracking environmental “hot spots” within a city or county.

The reaction to Martus by these potential users has been very enthusiastic. The concept of developing Open Source technology for the social justice sector is resonating, and we’re hoping to make a major contribution to the effectiveness of this field. We are now actively developing the Martus software.

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New Project Research

The most critical challenge at Benetech is not finding good ideas for socially beneficial applications of technology; it’s deciding which of the hundreds of good ideas are the few great ideas that Benetech will execute.

We have set up a process modeled after venture capital portfolio management to choose the small number of projects in which we will invest. These are the projects that we feel offer the best opportunities for an exceptional social return on investment. In the last quarter, we worked fifty new innovative concepts down to twenty, then a dozen and finally to three. We are currently creating business plans on the three most promising concepts and plan to actively start development on one or two by year-end. The projects are in the following areas:

Creating accessible software for use on mass market PDAs and/or cellular phones for people with a wide range of disabilities, including visual, hearing, physical and cognitive
Designing a Talking Camera for blind people
Providing greatly improved landmine detectors to the humanitarian demining community

We are also exploring several possible extensions to our current projects, including:

Making medical equipment manuals available for supporting maintenance in the developing world, using our Bookshare.org technology
Extending the Martus human rights bulletin technology into the fields of domestic violence, gay and lesbian rights and environmental rights.

In addition, we are investigating projects in the environmental field, especially in the area of information technology.

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Conclusion

Benetech is gaining momentum in its quest to bring technology to bear on important social needs. We’re attracting more talented people to our team, and moving forward rapidly on our first major projects, Bookshare.org and Martus. Please track our progress, and we hope you’ll join us in realizing our vision of technology serving humanity!

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
Email: [email protected]