Benetech :: About Benetech :: President's Update

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

June 2006

The challenge is on for the Benetech team! Last year, we outlined an ambitious three year business plan and the foundations of two of Silicon Valley’s key leaders are now providing the core support for that plan: Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s first President and founder, respectively). At the same time, we are accountable to deliver on the key objectives of our business plan. Here are some of our top goals:

Change the history of at least one country through our human rights information program
Grow the users of Bookshare.org digital library for the disabled to more than 10,000 by 2008 (tripling from 2005)
Launch our new Route 66 Literacy enterprise and get it to 40% supported by earned income by the end of 2007
Greatly increase our support from individual donors (tripling this as well)
Recruit at least four senior Silicon Valley leaders to get active with Benetech as volunteers and advisors

To hit these ambitious goals, we need to strengthen our team, raise more money and tighten our messaging. These are the major focus for me in 2006.

Highlights of this Letter:

Fund raising success (yeah!)
New Chief Technical Officer
New website for Benetech
Major Project Updates
- Route 66 Literacy
- Landmine Detector
- Bookshare.org and NFB-Newsline®
- Environmental software
- Changing history in East Timor
Jim speaking all over the world

Fund Raising Success

Getting strong support from both Omidyar and Skoll is a major landmark for Benetech. This marks the first time our largest backers are from the Silicon Valley tech community.

I just attended the ceremony in Oxford in April - where Benetech was recognized as a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll Foundation has been supporting us at roughly the $100,000 a year level, and this award was for more than $400,000 per year for three years for a total of over $1.2 million. The Omidyar Network provided us with three years of support totaling $1.5 million. Together, these incredible investments provide our team with the capital to take risks and build Benetech’s capacity to scale up both our existing projects and launch new ones. You might think that this has solved all of our fund raising needs, but the funding is structured to challenge us to broaden and deepen our funding to support current and future ventures.

New Chief Technical Officer

Our commitment to deliver on these results drove us to search for a Chief Technical Officer. At Benetech, this role is crucial for my personal ability to survive, since much of my activity centers around technology issues. I’m happy to announce that Patrick Ball accepted the challenge of Benetech’s CTO position. Patrick was promoted from within Benetech to take on these responsibilities. He already has a global reputation for technical excellence and impact from his work as one of the world’s leading human rights statisticians. My expectation is that Patrick will be able to play the larger role of advancing Benetech and the field of values-based technology development, while keeping his hand in the human rights arena, much as I’ve been able to stay involved in the disability technology field while leading Benetech.

In addition to providing our primary tech leadership, Patrick’s role as CTO will have strong exposure outside Benetech. It’s essential that Benetech’s public face be more than just me, and I’m excited about having someone as dynamic and smart as Patrick spreading the word about values in technology development in general, and Benetech’s mission in literacy, the environment, landmine removal and human rights in specific. I hope you all get a chance to meet Patrick soon!

New Benetech website

Essential to our goals of expanding our impact is getting the word out about our work. Striking a better balance between the “head” aspects of technology and the “heart” impact on people has been crucial. Our new website, created with last year’s capacity building grant from the Skoll Foundation, makes a much more compelling statement of this heart/head balance. Be sure to check it out, and let me know how we can improve it even further!

Route 66 Literacy

Our new Route 66 Literacy project is a partnership between The Center for Literacy and Disability Studies (CLDS) of the University of North Carolina at, Chapel Hill and Benetech. The concept for Route 66 was developed by Dr. Karen Erickson, one the nation’s leading experts in literacy for people with disabilities. This web based service relies on a scientifically-proven instructional technique developed by Karen and her team.

We are just wrapping up our first beta test program, where we tested the prototype with more than ten people at C.A.R. in Palo Alto. The 12 week beta test went well, and we’ve decided to push forward with the project. Now we just need to raise money to go to the next step!

Route 66 Literacy includes all of the essential elements of literacy instruction - reading comprehension, word study, fluency and writing - while emphasizing high-interest content that is targeted at older students and adults. The central premise is this: adolescent and adult beginning literacy instruction is much more effective when timely content is tailored to the appropriate group or interest demographic. The content for the service, for example, is composed of stories about popular culture, current events and community participation. Even better: because the Route 66 Literacy service is delivered online, these materials can be updated as frequently as necessary. We are using images from Flickr that have Creative Commons licensing: a key aspect for making the content feasible from a cost standpoint.

An essential and unique component of the Route 66 Literacy system is its integrated “Teacher Tutor” feature. The Teacher Tutor helps ensure that the instructors, often parents and volunteers working with individuals with developmental disabilities, have all the support they need to be as effective a teacher as possible. We are excited about the medium-term possibilities of applying this technology to the general issue of global literacy. My dream is to someday see a literate daughter in the developing world helping teach her mom to read using an inexpensive cell phone!

Landmine Detector

Great news: we have a preliminary agreement with GE to use their explosives detection technology to prototype a humanitarian landmine detector! We also have a contingent grant of $250,000 from the Lemelson Foundation to help fund the next phase of technology development, and we’re hoping to meet the contingencies shortly. Our next challenge is getting an export license from the U.S. government, and that means meeting the concerns of the Defense Department. For us, this is a pretty new area, and we’re looking for help to navigate the political minefields before we can get to the real minefields.

Bookshare.org

These are exciting times for Bookshare.org. We’ve just hired Jennifer Sutton and John Glass, two long-term experts in adaptive technology, to tackle our expanding needs. Of particular interest is a new law in the U.S. that mandates that all K-12 textbooks be delivered in the high quality NIMAS XML format. We just received a $60,000 grant from the NEC Foundation of America to create an open source tool we call the NIMAS Validator, which makes it easier for publishers and adaptive content producers to measure the quality of these new books. We’ve also formally launched our expanded newspaper service in cooperation with the National Federation of the Blind’s Newsline® service: more than 125 daily newspapers updated every morning at 6 am! Other important metrics include 26,500+ books now in our repository and a population of student users that has doubled in the past year.

Environmental Project Management Software

We have been building the first working prototype of this software to help field conservation professionals manage projects, in a joint effort with the Conservation Measures Partnership. We liken it to TurboTax®, where the user is guided through the process through a questionnaire that focuses on biodiversity as well as providing direct access to different views of the same information. The software guides the field professional through best practices in managing conservation projects: we already have a Visio-like visual tool for depicting the logic chain from intervention through to improvements in biodiversity outcomes (healthier coral reefs or wetlands, more salmon, etc.) as well as a threat-ranking system for prioritizing interventions. As I noted in my last update, the Hewlett Foundation has committed $250,000 to this project, and it looks like our conservation NGO partners will be also be funding the project with both hard cash and soft resource commitments. With Hewlett’s assistance, we’re working with a small number of other donors to round out the funding through a product launch.

Changing History in East Timor and HRP

We have already been successful in making history with our human rights efforts, thanks to exciting developments in Timor-Leste (East Timor). For a while, we were concerned that our work with the truth commission there might never see the light of day, but a dramatic series of leaks in January and February led to our ability to post our work publicly. The story was also well-covered in Wired News.

The magnitude of deaths in Timor-Leste has long been a subject of contentious debate, and Benetech's results help to place the debate on a factual basis. Our report detailed widespread and systematic violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality. These estimates are the most accurate and scientifically rigorous ever made for conflict-related mortality in Timor-Leste. They are based on a database developed jointly by Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) and the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation (CAVR in Portuguese), the truth commission for Timor-Leste.

In partnership with the CAVR, HRDAG has injected new scientifically defensible analysis into the debate about crimes of policy during the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste. These analyses were integrated into the CAVR Report alongside multi-disciplinary research including legal reasoning, history, anthropology, and sociology.

Patrick Ball had this to say: “The terrible violence in Timor-Leste has long been hidden from the world's attention. Even recently, as press coverage of the CAVR's report began, there have been political debates about the scale, pattern, and responsibility for the violence. Our analysis helps shift the debate from politics to science, moving from data, to knowledge, to official recognition of the crimes, and ultimately to accountability.”

Jim does Davos, Tunis, Oxford, New Zealand, Atlanta, New York, etc.

I have been traveling like crazy over the last six months, spreading the word about Benetech, our projects and social entrepreneurship. The keynotes I’ve been giving lately have been especially fun: at the Social Enterprise Alliance conference, the Global Social Venture Plan competition, and a technical conference on pattern recognition in New Zealand (how could I resist!?), along the general theme that social entrepreneurship is not rocket science. I get to speak to this from experience as a former rocket scientist!

The chance to speak to students and budding social entrepreneurs is gratifying: nothing like idealistic energy married to pragmatism. This year, I expect to speak at schools as varied as UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, University of Geneva, University of the Pacific, Harvard, MIT and Columbia. Social entrepreneurship is highly accessible and motivational for students, and I expect to see more great ideas coming out of these cauldrons of creativity.

I have been taking lots of pictures and writing my blog, the Beneblog. My most popular blog posting ever wasn’t written by me: it was written by my son, Jimmy, from Davos. It is a fun way to reflect on what we and other people are doing in social entrepreneurship, but from a more immediate and informal perspective!

Conclusion

You can help us, as always. We’re often looking for great people: we currently have plans to hire at least six people in the next few months. We are always working on getting access to technology and content, especially books. And, we are always seeking possible supporters who are excited about literacy, accessibility, human rights, the environment, removing landmines or simply about technology doing good things in the world. My door (and mouth) is usually open!

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