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

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

May 2004

This quarter’s update has an international flavor, as Benetech has been increasingly working all over the world. My top Benetech stories are:

Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship
Major Benetech article on Technology Social Enterprise
Martus in Colombia, Africa and Asia
HRDAG in Sierra Leone and East Timor
Landmine Detector Project
Bookaccess in Iraq
Bookshare.org
Benetech Everywhere! The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland

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A Major Award

We don’t even have a press release approved yet, but we just received word that the Skoll Foundation has honored us with a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. This award is a major boost for us. The Skoll Foundation is providing significant general support for both 2004 and 2005, which is crucial for growing Benetech. Jeff Skoll was the first president of eBay, and he is a passionate supporter of social entrepreneurship.

ACM Article on Technology Serving Humanity

After I wrote an op-ed encouraging the technology community to engage more in the social sector last year, the ACM invited me to write a lengthier essay. This was a great opportunity to put forth the Benetech vision of how the technology community can have a bigger positive impact on society’s most disadvantaged communities. Our vision isn’t limited to Benetech: we want to see hundreds or thousands of projects with similar values flourish around the globe.

The article, entitled Technology Benefiting Humanity, was just published in Ubiquity, the ACM’s on-line journal. I welcome your comments, and please send the link to anyone you think would find this interesting, hopefully anyone with an interest in seeing our technology community change the world for the better!

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Martus

Martus projects are coming into being around the world, thanks to user demand and significant support from the funding community. Our latest major agreement is directly with the U.S. Department of State, which is funding Martus roll-outs in Africa (including Algeria, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria) and the translation of Martus into Arabic and French. The State Department has a mission to document human rights abuses around the world, and this contract to support Martus is designed to improve the infrastructure for independent human rights organizations to report on human rights issues and violations.

We are now able to announce a key partnership in Colombia. We are working with the Catholic Church to use Martus as a reporting tool for gathering reporting on human rights violations. The MacArthur Foundation has been our primary funder for this initiative.

We are also expecting to work further with our important partners, such as the Asia Foundation (who introduced Martus to the State Department and sponsored the first major Martus roll-out in the Philippines), Freedom House (Mexico, central Asia and Algeria) and the American Bar Association (Sierra Leone).

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The Human Righs Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)

We are enjoying having HRDAG as part of the Benetech family, with its deep expertise in human rights and field personnel around the world. Projects are going on right now in nine countries. I’d like to focus on our activities in just a few countries that illustrate the kind of work we’re doing.

In Sierra Leone, we have multiple projects going in the post-conflict environment. We just wrapped up work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where we helped analyze the testimonies they collected; their final report will be released in the next few months. We are also providing technical support to a household survey being conducted by the American Bar Association’s CEELI project, where the goal is to create additional, independent sources of information about violations that occurred during the civil war. Together, the information from the truth commission, the survey, and from civil society organizations will be combined to create a detailed statistical portrait of the brutal violence of the last fifteen years.

In East Timor, we are assisting the truth commission to collect and analyze four datasets covering the period starting with the Indonesian occupation of the country in 1975 through 1999. The data include qualitative testimonies of victim experiences, a household mortality survey, a census of all the gravesites in the country, and a database of military commanders. The truth commission's analysis will help the world's newest country to come to terms with the past.

We just received confirmation of a major grant from the Open Society Institute to continue development of our core database technology for analyzing human rights data.

One very exciting announcement is that Dr. Patrick Ball, the head of Benetech’s HRDAG, was just awarded the ACM’s Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. This recognition from the main professional organization in software development is especially welcome!

Victim and witness accounts often go unheard, but by using information technology we can preserve and amplify their voices. Rigorously analyzed information about violations drives change, delivers justice and writes history – if it can be wielded effectively. The goal of the HRDAG and Martus is to provide the human rights community with the right information tools for the job of changing the global human rights situation for the better!

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The Landmine Detector Project

We had been talking about adapting military explosives detection technology to the needs of the humanitarian demining sector for some time. We conducted initial explorations into the market needs and the potential technologies available for this application. It’s a clear case of market failure: the technology exists but the market size doesn’t justify a for-profit effort. The need is global. We would expect this technology to benefit communities all over the world: Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, Bosnia and Peru are just some examples.

We are pleased to announce that a very experienced Silicon Valley CEO/scientist is joining Benetech to drive this project forward, Ted Driscoll. Ted has floated the name “Clearing Storm Technologies” for the project, and we are busy raising the next round of funding for this initiative. Our efforts so far have been funded primarily through the generosity of Dr. Armand Neukermans, but we will need to broaden our funding base to take this project forward as it is likely to be our largest project in financial capital requirements to date.

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Bookaccess in Iraq

Through a partnership with the Mississippi Consortium for International Development and Jackson State University, Benetech is using its electronic book expertise from Bookshare.org to serve a new audience: students in the developing world. We have examined the needs in different countries, such as Angola. The funding has just become available for this work in Iraq, through USAID. We are working to deliver journals, textbooks and reference books for the departments of medicine, nursing and public health/sanitation at the University of Mosul in northern Iraq. We see this as a first pilot project to explore what can be done to make critically important information available to students and faculty in a way that matches accessibility (financial and logistical) with the rights of authors and publishers.

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Bookshare.org

Bookshare.org just announced a major innovation for schools: our new Institutional Access. This provides teachers of students with learning and visual disabilities or staff at disability student services with the option to download books for their students with disabilities and deliver the books to their students in the most accessible form. This is side-by-side the already existing option to provide independent student access through a sponsored student subscription. We have had a great deal of demand for Institutional Access from educators, and initial uptake of the program is strong. The first school to join our program was Harvard University.

We are also pleased to announce a major partnership with Indiana University that illustrates the power of Bookshare.org. IU has been scanning hundreds of textbooks for their students over the past five years. Thanks to our new partnership, more than 1,800 college textbooks will be contributed to Bookshare.org by Indiana University. These books will become available through Bookshare.org to any student with a disability in the U.S. who needs them!

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Benetech Everywhere

We are trying to spread the word about the social applications of technology everywhere we can. Here’s just a sampling of these activities:

Davos: I spoke twice in January at the World Economic Forum. This was a terrific experience as I met with the heads of Phillips, Applied Materials, the Kaufman Foundation, Hewlett Packard, Human Rights Watch, Geekcorps, Palm and the UK’s Charity Bank. I was able to chat with people as varied as the chief rabbi of Russia, international human rights leaders and numerous Silicon Valley technology leaders.
Africa Economic Summit: Thanks to my connection with the World Economic Forum and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, I will be attending this summit in Mozambique in early June.
The Fifth Gathering of the Social Enterprise Alliance: I was proud of the performance of this conference, the premier conference for nonprofits engaged in enterprise solutions to social problems: the conference was firmly in the black! I was one of the founding board members of the organization and just recently reelected to a three-year term.
Attended the Fast Company Awards, where Benetech was recognized as "The Top 20 Groups That Are Changing the World."
N-TEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, where we met the community of nonprofit technologists

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Conclusion

My major goal for the next few months is to focus on funding our ambitious plans to change the world with technology. Nonprofits have a much more challenging time finding capital than other organizations. At Benetech, we have been blessed by achieving significant fund raising success in the past few years. We do pay a price in human bandwidth: fund raising does consume a tremendous amount of the time of our management team. And, there is far more that we could be doing – both with our existing projects and our proposed projects – if we had the resources.

I want Benetech to represent the best of what the technology community has to offer the world. We have a compelling vision for making this happen. If you know someone who would be captivated by our vision and who can help make it happen, please put them in touch with me. That’s my job, and there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing!

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