Recent press releases:

Benetech CEO to Receive Highest Honor in Blindness Field
Prestigious "Migel Medal" Awarded by American Foundation for the Blind (AFB); Recognizes Exceptional Career-Long Accomplishments

April 19, 2013, Chicago, Illinois, — Benetech's President and CEO, Jim Fruchterman, has been selected to receive the highest honor in the blindness field — the 2013 Migel Medal. The award will be presented on Saturday, April 20, 2013, during the American Foundation for the Blind's (AFB) National Leadership Conference. Kay Ferrell, professor and author, will also receive this top honor, recognizing her career-long efforts.

Benetech Names Justin Adams as Communications Director

January 22, 2013, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech has announced the appointment of Justin Adams as the organization's new Communications Director. For the past 15 years, Adams has worked in both the corporate and non-profit sectors, focusing on the intersection of technology, communications and issues management.

Benetech Celebrates Milestone; Human Rights Data Analysis Group Transitioning into Independent Organization
Years in the Making, Spin-Off Group to Focus on Science & Statistics; Benetech's Human Rights Program to Remain Focused on Technology & Tools

January 18, 2013, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech has announced that an initiative of its Human Rights Program, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), will be spinning off from the organization and transitioning into its own, independent group. The initiative, led by Dr. Patrick Ball, has been part of Benetech's Human Rights Program for nine years, though it was originally intended to spin off after three to five years. The official date of the spin off is February 1, 2013.

United Nations Issues Report on Deaths in Syria
Benetech Human Rights Program Examines Seven Data Bases to Identify Nearly 60,000 Killings

January 2, 2013, Palo Alto, CA — The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) today released a report which provides an analysis of the total number of documented conflict-related killings in Syria between March 2011 and November 2012. The UN report is based on a statistical analysis conducted by the Benetech Human Rights Program.

After analyzing information about fully identified victims from seven databases, Benetech scientists have determined that 59,648 unique killings were documented during this period. Of those documented killings, 76.1% are male victims, 7.5% are female victims, and 16.4% of the records do not indicate the gender of the victim. Entitled, "Preliminary Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in Syria," the report was written by scientists Megan Price, Jeff Klingner and Patrick Ball of the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG).  The UN released a statement today describing the report as an exhaustive analysis.

The report integrates information from six databases compiled by Syrian human rights monitors and one database collected by the Syrian government. This is Benetech’s fourth and final report for OHCHR, with earlier reports analyzing fewer datasets. Although the Syrian conflict makes it difficult to identify an accurate record of events, both governmental and non-governmental monitors continue to gather data about killings through a variety of sources. The report explores the state of this documentation and the quantitative relationship of the data sources to highlight how different data collection methods impact our understanding of this conflict.

Benetech Wins Five-Year Award to Dramatically Improve Accessibility of Educational Materials
New cutting edge technologies will help give students with print disabilities the same opportunities as their peers

July 23, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech has won a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, to continue its groundbreaking Bookshare initiative. Even as major changes in technology disrupt education, Bookshare ensures that educational materials are accessible to students with print disabilities. The award, named "Bookshare and Innovation for Education" (BI4E), allows Benetech to meet the challenges of the changing educational landscape by also creating free open source tools for content providers and working with those providers to make educational materials accessible from the start. Benetech's innovative tools will tackle such major challenges as accessible math and graphic illustrations. This project will increase dissemination of tools developed under the DIAGRAM R&D Center and promote better ways to find and read accessible materials.

"While more content today is 'born digital,' it also needs to be 'born accessible,'" said Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Literacy Program at Benetech. "As a nonprofit that uses the technology tools pioneered in Silicon Valley, we are committed to continue revolutionizing the field of accessibility at a fraction of the cost of current approaches, delivering the next generation of innovation."

Benetech Bookshare Library and Mada Launch Accessible Arabic eBook Collection
New Titles Expand Reading Opportunities for Arabic Readers with Print Disabilities

June 19, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech Bookshare library, the largest online accessible collection of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities, in partnership with Mada (Qatar Assistive Technology Center), has released 100 new titles in Arabic, giving Arabic readers with print disabilities the opportunity to read a diverse range of material.

The collection includes children’s books from Scholastic, contemporary books from Arab Scientific Publishers in Lebanon, and literary books from the public domain, in collaboration with Kotobarabia in Egypt.

Bookshare books are accessible to people who are unable to read standard print books due to blindness, low vision, physical disabilities and severe learning disabilities that affect reading, such as dyslexia. Using computer software, tablet computers, assistive technology devices, phones, and MP3 players, Bookshare members can listen to books with high quality text-to-speech voices, read books in digital Braille, or magnify and highlight words as needed. The launch of the Arabic-language collection gives people with print disabilities in the Arab-speaking world the opportunity to read for school, work, or leisure and to participate more fully in society.

"We are proud to announce the addition of Arabic-language titles to the Bookshare collection, making this the largest collection of accessible Arabic books in the world. We thank Mada for its support, which enabled Bookshare to develop the technology needed to process Arabic-language content," said Betsy Beaumon, VP and General Manager of Literacy at Benetech, the parent organization of Bookshare.

Benetech Releases Software Tool to Support Crowdsourcing of Image Descriptions in Accessible Books

May 10, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech DIAGRAM Center has released an open source web application to create and edit crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM can help level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers with disabilities. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will also be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format.

DIAGRAM, which stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials, is dramatically changing the way image and graphic content for accessible educational materials is produced and accessed. Before this initiative, critical illustrations in math and science books could only be studied by those reading traditional texts. The DIAGRAM Center was launched in May 2010 by Benetech with support from the US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The Center is managed by Benetech in partnership with the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) and US Fund for DAISY (USFDAISY).

Benetech Scientists Publish Analysis of Indirect Sampling Methods in the Journal of the American Medical Association

August 2, 2011, Palo Alto, CA - Scientists from the Benetech Human Rights Program have published a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which examines how researchers measure the impact of violent armed conflict on public health. Demographer Romesh Silva and statistician Megan Price note in their comments that while armed conflict creates difficult conditions for researchers, valid scientific measurement can help guide the design of humanitarian assistance programs and strengthen human rights truth and accountability mechanisms.

The JAMA commentary notes that public health researchers acknowledge limitations in their traditional sampling methods and have begun to explore alternative approaches such as indirect sampling. Silva and Price discuss the tradeoffs of using indirect sampling to measure the health consequences of armed conflict in diverse settings from the Thai-Burmese border area to Tanzania, Uganda and Northern India. The commentary notes that indirect sampling provides public health researchers with a potential low-cost method to sample difficult-to-reach populations during armed conflicts and their aftermath, but emphasizes that questions remain about the reliability and validity of the data collected via indirect sampling.

Data Analysis By Benetech Scientists Aid in Arrest of Former Guatemalan Police Chief

June 27, 2011 Palo Alto, CA — Analysis of police documents by Benetech scientists provided critical information used to support the arrest of the former chief of the Guatemalan National Police who is accused of complicity in the 1984 disappearance of a union leader. The arrest of Hector Bol de la Cruz, 70, at his home in Jutiapa southwest of Guatemala City on June 9, is the latest step in an ongoing investigation of former police officials accused of disappearing and murdering Edgar Fernando García and other political activists during the country's 36 years of armed internal conflict. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán, based in part on Benetech's analysis of a random sample of 31.7 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive, provided key evidence in the conviction last year of two former police officers who served under de la Cruz in the Guatemalan National Police.

Bookshare Showcases Student Technology and its Free, Federally Funded Accessible Book Initiative

May 16, 2011, Washington, DC — Students with print disabilities and administrators from the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), along with library and government officials, shared their stories and progress toward improving academic equality and lifelong learning through the use of technology at an event last week at the DC Public Library.

Robert Wexler Joins Benetech Board of Directors

April 28, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech is pleased to announce that attorney Robert Wexler has joined its board of directors. Wexler is a principal at Adler & Colvin, a firm specializing in the law of nonprofit organizations. His practice focuses primarily on tax and corporate matters for nonprofits and their donors. Wexler is also a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School, where he teaches the Law of Nonprofit Organizations.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Signs Agreement to Provide Titles to Bookshare

April 14, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (JWa, JWb), a leading publisher serving the professional, consumer, scientific, technical, medical and academic communities worldwide, has agreed to provide Bookshare with digital files of professional and trade titles for their collection. This agreement will broaden the access of people with disabilities to Wiley content.

Benetech Releases Accessible E-book App for Apple Device Market

January 31, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech has announced Read2Go, a new accessible e-book reader for Apple iOS devices. Developed in partnership with Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd, which is known for its PLEXTALK® brand of digital talking book players, Read2Go is the most full-featured, accessible DAISY reader available for the Apple device market. Read2Go is an easy-to-use app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod that connects directly to Benetech's Bookshare service and DAISY 2.02 and 3.0 materials from other sources. Read the full press release here.

Literacy Instruction for Adolescent and Adult Beginning Readers

January 25, 2011 — Literacy experts at the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies (CLDS) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in partnership with Benetech, have introduced a subscription version of Route 66 Literacy this winter. Route 66 Literacy is a flexible, dynamic, internet-based instructional program that provides literacy instruction to adolescent and beginning adult readers.

View entire Press Release Archive.

Recent announcements:

John DeCock Becomes Benetech's New Vice President of Development and Communications — November 5, 2012

Benetech has appointed a seasoned environmental activist to lead its development and communications initiatives. John DeCock, who has been a leader in conservation and environmental activism for more than three decades, is Benetech's new Vice President of Development and Communications. DeCock worked for 27 years with the Sierra Club and The Sierra Club Foundation where he served as Executive Director for nine years. As Deputy Conservation Director for the Sierra Club, DeCock oversaw the organization's national campaigns, state lobbying and environmental law programs.

Most recently, DeCock served as President and CEO of Clean Water Action, a national environmental group established in 1972 to lead the passage of the historic Clean Water Act. DeCock directed the organization's federal and state policy initiatives. He worked with a coalition of activists during the 2008 presidential elections, leading voter registration drives and serving on the Executive Committee of America Votes.

"At Benetech we have limitless potential to apply our approach to any issue and succeed," says DeCock. "Environmental conservation has been my personal and professional passion for decades, but the social justice issues addressed through our human rights and literacy programs also change the world in ways that really speak to my core values."

Admired Member of the Bookshare Staff is Honored as Contributor of the Quarter — September 26, 2012

A member of the Bookshare staff who is admired for her commitment to accessible texts has been honored by Benetech as Contributor of the Quarter. Mayrie, who has worked as a Bookshare scanner and proofreader since December 2008, was nominated for the award by her co-workers. Held in high regard for her particularly skillful and productive contributions to the Bookshare library, Mayrie announced her retirement from Bookshare this month.

"Mayrie has been a dedicated colleague and a beloved member of our extended community for many years," says Alisa Moore, Manager of the Bookshare Volunteer Program. "We are very happy to see her excellent work recognized in this way."

Bookshare is the world's largest online accessible library of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities. The Bookshare library, which is operated by Benetech, has over 150,000 books and serves more than 200,000 members.

Mayrie began working with Bookshare as a volunteer in August 2006 and earned her membership by scanning and submitting hundreds of books. By the time she was hired as a staff member, Mayrie had played a key role in entering more than 1,000 accessible books into the collection. Mayrie, who is blind, says her primary motivation when starting out with Bookshare was to provide timely books for young adult and teen readers.

"When I was a teenager, I never got to read what the other kids were reading because the books were not available until long after," said Mayrie. "So what I primarily offered to Bookshare was 900 young adult and teen books and now that I work for Bookshare, my total is close to 1,500 books."

A resident of Northern California, Mayrie began to scan books for Bookshare after working as a nanny and in food service. When she developed rheumatoid arthritis, which ended her work in these fields, Mayrie said she searched for other ways to make a contribution. Mayrie notes that Bookshare now offers more books than the entire collection of her local branch library.

Mayrie reads books in the Bookshare collection using a text to speech application. She says the last three books she read were mysteries, but her guilty pleasure are romance novels. As an avid reader and an admitted perfectionist, Mayrie says it matters to her that Bookshare texts are carefully proofed and high quality.

"I still believe that Bookshare is one of the most needed and most appreciated services out there for people with print disabilities," says Mayrie. "I have really enjoyed working for Bookshare. I have the dream job. I couldn't have asked for better people to work with or a better job situation. I am very fortunate."

The entire Benetech staff congratulates Mayrie for receiving the Contributor of the Quarter award and salutes her exceptional service to the Bookshare community.

Benetech Bookshare Program Highlighted by U.S. Department of Education — September 14, 2012
Officials Visit School in San Jose, California Where Students Use the Bookshare Service

U.S. Department of Education officials visited an elementary school in San Jose, California last week to highlight the Benetech Bookshare service and the role of digital technology in the classroom. Benetech recently won a second five-year award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), to continue its groundbreaking Bookshare initiative which ensures that educational materials are accessible to students with print disabilities.

The visit took place at the Toyon Elementary School where students with print disabilities have been using Bookshare for four years to read accessible texts. The event was covered in a story published by the San Jose Mercury News entitled, "Bookshare Helps San Jose Students with Disabilities Learn."

The article notes that Bookshare assists students by offering text to speech at varying speeds and highlights words on the screen as they are read - as well as providing text in enlarged fonts. The story quotes Bookshare Education Program Manager Kristina Cohen who notes that these features help students track words and focus. "With a traditional print book they can't concentrate; it's overwhelming," said Cohen.

The OSEP award, "Bookshare and Innovation for Education" (BI4E), allows Benetech to meet the challenges of a changing educational landscape by also creating free open source tools for content providers and working with them to make educational materials accessible from the start. Benetech's innovative tools will tackle such major challenges as accessible math and graphic illustrations. The project will increase dissemination of tools developed under the DIAGRAM R&D Center and promote better ways to find and read accessible materials.

Benetech's Dr. Patrick Ball Publishes Op-Ed in Wired — August 10, 2012

Dr. Patrick Ball, Benetech's Chief Scientist and Director of its Human Rights Program, has published an op-ed in Wired News that raises concerns about an encrypted web-based chat application called CryptoCat which was the subject of an admiring profile. Ball's op-ed challenges a Wired opinion piece about CryptoCat which presented information about certain security tools for human rights workers that Ball found inaccurate, misleading, and potentially dangerous.

Entitled When It Come to Human Rights, There are No Online Security Shortcuts, Ball notes that CryptoCat is one of a whole class of applications that rely on host-based security and are subject to a well-known attack. As one of the developers of the Benetech Martus encrypted database software used by thousands of human rights activists around the world, Ball notes that flawed security tools can expose sensitive information and endanger activists who use them. Ball analyzes security threats and their impact on Martus and other tools.

"I understand the desire to find better solutions – real security is still too hard for many people, something we see every day in our Martus trainings, and we are working with other software projects to make it easier," writes Ball. "But the unfortunately all-to-common media journalist rushing to embrace and publicize phony shortcuts as if they were the solution for human rights activists around the world not only doesn't help, it can be deadly."

Ball goes on to suggest several questions that users of security tools should ask themselves before they trust their software. "Here are a few ways to think about a security tool: When someone offers you a security tool, ask yourself: who holds the keys? Can an attacker get my keys? Can an attacker read my passphrase? How does the cryptographic software get to my computer? Can I review it? Authenticate it? Can an attacker steal my passphrase? Where is my trust placed, and what does it mean to trust? These can be useful questions to keep in mind. When it's really important to keep your data secret, it's worth consulting an expert."

Ball's op-ed has been reposted to several other sites including BoingBoing.

Read Jim Fruchterman's Beneblog about the CryptoCat controversy here.

Benetech in the News — June 22, 2012

Stories about Benetech and its programs have been appearing in a variety of online news outlets in the past few weeks. In addition this month's interview of Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman on the Forum program hosted by San Francisco Public Radio Station KQED, Jim appeared on KALW, San Francisco's other public radio station. The San Francisco CBS affiliate talked to Jim for their story about the TEDx San Jose conference. Blogger Steve Farnsworth also spoke with Jim at TEDx San Jose about how businesses can engage in social good.

St Mary's College of California posted Jim's commencement address to its students in which he talked about how to learn from failure.

Benetech's SocialCoding4Good project was covered by the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Policymic which both wrote thoughtful stories. eSchool News posted an article about Benetech's DIAGRAM Center and its open source web application for creating and editing crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. Finally, the Annapolis Patch profiled Eldre Boggs who was recognized by Benetech's Bookshare library for outstanding service on behalf of students with print disabilities. We'll bring you more links next month to more stories about Benetech's impact on the world.

Benetech SocialCoding4Good Partners with Random Hacks of Kindness
Supporting Sustainability for Applications Addressing Human Rights and Accessible Technology — June 1, 2012

June 1, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech SocialCoding4Good program has joined with Geeks Without Bounds as the first Random Hacks of Kindness Sustainability Partners. This exciting partnership prototype will provide acceleration and mentorship opportunities to high potential open source software projects developed at the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) global hackathon, taking place June 1st through 3rd at more than 25 locations worldwide. These partnerships recognize that projects conceived and created at RHoK events must be sustained and supported beyond the hackathon weekend to ensure real world adoption and impact.

At this June event, SocialCoding4Good will feature projects that focus on two key areas: "Accessibility in Education, Supporting Students with Disabilities" and Data Applications for Human Rights. After the event, teams building solutions to these critical problems will have the opportunity to submit their project for review by subject matter experts in accessibility and human rights technology. One team will then be selected to receive six months of mentorship from Benetech.

This mentorship will concentrate on supporting project sustainability, so that the ideas generated at the RHoK event can be developed and deployed as real solutions to problems faced by real people. Benetech and SocialCoding4Good teams will provide guidance on everything from technical project management to business, organizational, and fundraising development, as well as providing project visibility to its corporate, nonprofit, and humanitarian free and open source (HFOSS) partners. At the end of the six months, the selected RHoK team will present a video documenting its experience to the next RHoK global event in December 2012. Read more here.

About Random Hacks of Kindness
RHoK is a community of innovators building practical open technology to make the world a better place. RHoK global hackathons gather designers, programmers, and other individuals to develop solutions to a pressing real-world challenges. Subject matter experts from nonprofits, NGOs, and government are brought in to define problems and inform participants on relevant issues, with the intent of furthering the use of applications created during the event. RHoK has hosted four global events to date, counting more than 4000 participants in 45 cities around the world. Solutions developed by the RHoK community have been used by emergency responders, municipalities, and organizations such as the World Bank.

About SocialCoding4Good
The SocialCoding4Good platform supports the growing global momentum around technology for good, channeling the creativity and enthusiasm it ignites and enabling meaningful apps generated at events and hackathons to develop into lasting solutions with real, positive results. It partners with HFOSS organizations including Amara, Code for America, FrontlineSMS, The Guardian Project, and Wikimedia Foundation, connecting qualified software industry professionals with opportunities to volunteer time and talent to projects matching their passions, skills, and experience; together, creating true, transformative impact.

Benetech Releases Software Tool to Support Crowdsourcing of Image Descriptions in Accessible Books — May 10, 2012

The Benetech DIAGRAM Center has released an open source web application to create and edit crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM can help level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers with disabilities. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will also be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format.

DIAGRAM, which stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials, is dramatically changing the way image and graphic content for accessible educational materials is produced and accessed. Before this initiative, critical illustrations in math and science books could only be studied by those reading traditional texts. The DIAGRAM Center was launched in May 2010 by Benetech with support from the US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The Center is managed by Benetech in partnership with the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) and US Fund for DAISY (USFDAISY). For more information about the Poet tool read here.

10 Million Images From Guatemalan National Police Go Online — April 27, 2012

The Boing Boing weblog, which ranks as one of the most widely read technology blogs in the world, has posted a story about the online posting of 10 million images from the Guatemalan National Police Archive. Offered in an unredacted digital repository created by the University of Texas, scholars are using the scanned documents to examine the role of the National Police in illegal surveillance, disappearances and deaths of dissidents during Guatemala's 36 years of armed internal conflict. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán based on analysis of Archive documents provided key evidence in the 2011 conviction of two former Guatemalan National Police officers accused of disappearing and murdering Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando García.

" . . . scientists have used sampling and statistics to find patterns in the Archive that illuminate how command works, and prosecutors have won convictions of former police officers for disappearances that were unsolved for decades," Patrick Ball, the director of the Benetech Human Rights Program told Boing Boing. "Several retired officers from the senior leadership of the Police, including the former Director, Col. Héctor Bol de la Cruz, have been charged with overseeing disappearances in the 1980s, and are likely to stand trial."

Benetech Bookshare Library Marks Decade of Innovations — March 14, 2012

Early eBook Pioneer Changes the Lives of People with Print Disabilities

The Benetech Bookshare library, one of the world's largest collections of digital accessible books for people with print disabilities, announced its 10th anniversary this week. For the last decade, Bookshare has been at the forefront of the digital book revolution, applying Silicon Valley technology to meet the reading needs of people with print disabilities. The library now has over 140,000 accessible eBooks including textbooks, reference materials, newspapers and best-selling titles.

Benetech CEO and founder Jim Fruchterman first envisioned the Bookshare library as a collection of eBooks created by volunteers. These early eBook creators would digitize texts that could be legally downloaded from the Internet by people with qualified print disabilities such as blindness, low vision, physical disabilities, or severe learning disabilities. A former rocket scientist and 2006 MacArthur Fellow, Fruchterman acted on his vision and launched Bookshare, introducing an innovative new approach to reading for an underserved population.

"We wanted to reinvent the library for people with print disabilities, to make sure they had the books they need for education, employment, and social inclusion," said Fruchterman. "With technology, we knew we could inexpensively solve 95% of the problem, rather than 5%."

Read more here.

Martus Community Meets in Thailand to Plan Next Generation Software

Participants at the first Martus users and supporters meeting gathered this week in Chiang Mai, Thailand to share ideas for the next generation of the software.

March 6, 2012, Chiang Mai, Thailand — Users and supporters of the Benetech Martus software gathered for a three-day discussion in Chiang Mai, Thailand last week to plan for the next generation of technical development. Created in 2001, Martus is used by human rights groups worldwide to secure sensitive data. While Benetech frequently meets individually with organizations that use the tool, this was the first meeting of the global Martus community including grassroots and international activists, funders, and technology experts, as well as the Benetech training and development team.

Participants at the meeting proposed and reviewed improvements to Martus that will make the greatest impact on their work. They agreed to continue developing an "ecosystem" of active, engaged users to share ideas, resources and capabilities. Broadening the Martus development process will allow human rights groups to acquire more evidence of human rights violations, secure this information, and manage their data more effectively to help end impunity.

"We have come together as a diverse array of Martus stake holders and looked at the big picture to see how Martus can include other tools such as mobile applications and TOR servers," says Vijaya Tripathi, Benetech Human Rights Program Manager. "By encouraging our users to take more ownership of the development process, we can take a big step forward to support more robust and secure human rights documentation."

Funded by the Open Society Institute, the Martus gathering included a detailed review of the software and its application in a wide range of human rights projects. Participants provided vital feedback for next generation development including recommendations for translation support, expansion of the Martus server network, easier customization of data entry templates, data management improvements, and TOR servers that can enable anonymous Internet access. Martus users will also help develop tools to upload data captured on mobile devices and apply machine-learning strategies to understand the information.

The Martus software was created in extensive consultation with leading human right organizations. Among the Martus users present at the Chiang Mai meeting were representatives from the Guatemalan National Police Archive Project, which deploys Martus to secure documents used to prosecute former security officials accused of human rights violations. Martus users from the Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma (ND-Burma), a network of thirteen Burmese organizations that use Martus to document human rights violations in Burma, also joined the discussion.

ND-Burma coordinator Han Gyi said that the Chiang Mai meeting allowed members of his network to share their experiences and observe how people from other countries use Martus. "It has been really useful to brainstorm about prioritizing the development of Martus and what we will need in the future," said Gyi. "We trained all the people in our network to input data into Martus using a standard input and documentation system, this is why we have collaboration. Meetings like this allow us to solve our problems together and plan for the next step."

Martus users have agreed to create a private forum to continue to generate ideas for the further development of the software. Dr. Patrick Ball, director of the Benetech Human Rights Program, invites interested organizations to work with Benetech to build software tools that support distributed, secure information sharing for human rights documentation.

"Martus has developed in very close relationship with the people who actually document human rights violations, so we need to hear from them about the most important things we need to do to support their work," said Ball. "I've been most excited about the big picture, new ideas using data mining and machine-learning techniques to bring out meaning from masses of qualitative information that the human rights community has in such richness."

Bookshare International Expands to Thirty Countries
Three New Partner Organizations in Norway, Austria and Brazil

February 7, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech's Bookshare library continues to expand its international service providing accessible books and publications to members in more than 30 countries. Bookshare International recently announced new partnerships with three organizations that are reaching out to readers with print disabilities in their countries. These include the Norwegian Library of Talking Books and Braille (NLB), the Hoerbuecherei des OSBV Talking Book Library in Austria, and the Dorina Nowill Foundation in Brazil.

Bookshare International members now have access to more than 50,000 titles, including books in Spanish, German, French, Hindi, and Tamil, and a robust collection of textbooks in Afrikaans! A diverse Bookshare team is working on a special project with Qatar's Mada Assistive Technology Center to add Arabic-language books to the collection which will be available in early 2012. Meanwhile, in the rural region of Ranipet in Tamil Nadu, India, 500 Bookshare texts, which had their spines removed for scanning, have found a new life with the Vedavalli Vidyalaya school. Vedavalli Vidyalaya serves more than 20 villages in and around Ranipet and is one of the few schools in a 100-mile radius to deliver high-quality education to students who cannot travel to the nearest city of Chennai. This is the area's very first library and the children are pleased to have access to the books which have all been nicely rebound, thanks to Bookshare's local book processing partner, Worth Trust.

Guatemalan National Police Archive Goes Online
University of Texas Hosts Digital Repository and Conference Where Benetech Presents Archive Research Data

January 25, 2012, Palo Alto, CA – The University of Texas at Austin has unveiled an online digital repository containing 12 million of the approximately 80 million documents contained in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive or the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). Discovered by chance in 2005, documents from the Guatemala City-based Archive have provided critical information in the prosecution of former members of Guatemalan security forces accused of human rights abuses during the country’s 36 years of armed internal conflict. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán based on analysis of Archive documents provided key evidence in the 2011 conviction of two former Guatemalan National Police officers accused of disappearing and murdering Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando García.

The new repository, which is based in Austin, Texas, was announced during an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Texas as part of its collaboration with the Archive. Entitled the Politics of Memory: Guatemala’s National Police Archive, the conference included a presentation by Dr. Patrick Ball, Chief Scientist and Vice President of the Human Rights Program at Benetech. Videos of the conference are available here with the Benetech presentation at minute 30.

Read more about the Archive project here.

Benetech Participates in Successful Anti-SOPA Blackout

January 19, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech joined the largest online protest in history yesterday joining more than 75,000 websites which altered their web pages to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Together with Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and other members of the Internet community, Benetech blacked out portions of www.benetech.org to draw attention to the controversial anti-piracy legislation which threatens to censor free speech and damage online innovation.

The proposed bills would place Benetech's Bookshare library in legal jeopardy by allowing Visa and Mastercard to stop processing donations or subscription payments based on uninformed accusations of copyright infringement. Bookshare operates under an exception in U.S. copyright law that makes accessible ebooks available to readers with print disabilities without requesting permission or paying royalties. While Bookshare opposes piracy of copyrighted works, the library is often contacted by authors and publishers who don't understand copyright law and demand that their books be removed.

SOPA and PIPA could also endanger Benetech's human rights projects including our Martus software which allows human rights activists to encrypt sensitive testimony to protect the identity of witnesses. If IP rights holders allege that Martus, or systems like TOR that help secure communications by activists, are being used to encrypt copyrighted works, human rights defenders could lose access to critical tools which are used around the world to combat violence, government surveillance and censorship.

The successful online protest against SOPA and PIPA has helped legislators understand the full impact of this overreaching anti-piracy legislation and reconsider their support for these measures. The Senate will bring the PIPA bill to the floor next week. Legislators need to know how this legislation could undermine critical services for the human rights community and readers with print disabilities who deserve our support.

Benetech Founder Jim Fruchterman Receives 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation

January 10, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech Founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman has received the 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurs (CASE) at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. CASE launched the Award for Enterprising Social Innovation (ESI) to recognize outstanding individuals, organizations, or companies whose innovations blend methods from the worlds of business and philanthropy to create sustainable social value that has the potential for large-scale impact. CASE awarded the inaugural recipient of the CASE Award in the spring of 2009 and accepts nominations from the public each spring. Past recipients have included E&Co (2009) and VisionSpring (2010). Second year MBA student and CASE Fellow Joanne Sprague has written an extensive blog post profiling Jim and Benetech's pioneering social enterprises. You can read the post here.

Amstat News Mentions Account of Testimony By Benetech Statistician

December 2011, Palo Alto, CA - Amstat News, the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association, noted that Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán authored the lead article in the current issue of CHANCE, the Association's publication for people interested in the analysis of data. CHANCE Executive Editor Sam Behseta, wrote that this "remarkable account" describes Guzmán's testimony as an expert witness in a Guatemalan human rights case. Guzmán's story details how multi-stage sampling methods were used to select relevant documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive and verify the authenticity of documents related to the case. "The court's ruling, which resulted in the conviction of the involved police forces, is not only a triumph for human rights, but also a reflection of the crucial role statisticians can play in serving justice globally," wrote Behseta.

The Benetech Martus Project Receives a Grant From the MacArthur Foundation

November 30, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech got some good news recently about our Martus software project that we launched back in 2003. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has provided a generous multi-year grant to the Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) to develop the next generation of Martus which has been downloaded in more than 120 countries. Martus — which is Greek for "witness" — is secure, open-source information management software used by human rights groups to gather, protect and communicate stories about human rights violations. Read more about this announcement here.

Bookshare Wins Award to Extend Innovative Tools and Content

U.S. Department of Education Funds Leveraging Impact Through Technology (LIT) Project

November 16, 2011 Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech Bookshare service has received a 1-year, $3M award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to launch 'LIT' or Leveraging Impact Through Technology. The LIT project, in partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR), will advance the Bookshare for Education (B4E) initiative that provides Bookshare's online library of copyrighted books free to all qualified U.S. students with a print disability.

Originally funded by a 5-year OSEP award granted in October 2007, the Bookshare for Education project has exceeded its membership and collection targets. B4E now serves 150,000 students and offers 80,000 new educational titles in Bookshare's total collection of more than 125,000 books. The LIT project will use innovative technologies to scale up these services by providing new content, tools and enhanced utilization in the following areas:

• Open-content, publicly available and freely shared image descriptions and reusable graphical models to enhance accessibility in NIMAC http://www.nimac.us/ books and Common Core http://www.corestandards.org/ titles.
• A free, open source Android ebook reader and a free web-based ebook reader along with an accessible bookshelf in the cloud that allows teachers to more easily assign books to students and enables parents and students to add books that are accessible from multiple devices.
• Access to Bookshare books in MP3 and DAISY audio.
• Free professional development for selected districts across the country to increase utilization, leveraging AIR's experience in practice and delivery and Bookshare's hands-on Professional Development Workshops.

For more information about the LIT project, read the press release here.

The Benetech Martus Project Receives a Grant From the MacArthur Foundation

November 30, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — Benetech got some good news recently about our Martus software project that we launched back in 2003. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has provided a generous multi-year grant to the Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) to develop the next generation of Martus which has been downloaded in more than 120 countries. Martus – which is Greek for "witness" – is secure, open-source information management software used by human rights groups to gather, protect and communicate stories about human rights violations. Read more about this announcement here.

Recent publications:

Megan Price, Jeff Klingner, and Patrick Ball (2013) Preliminary Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, The Benetech Human Rights Program, commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Harrison, A., (2012) Counting the Unknown Victims of Political Violence: The Work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, chapter in the book, Human Rights and Information Communications Technologies: Trends and Consequences of Use. 

Guzmán, D., Tamy Guberek, and Megan Price, (2012) Unobserved Union Violence: Statistical Estimates of the Total Number of Trade Unionists Killed in Colombia, 1999-2008, The Benetech Human Rights Program. (Available in Spanish)

Guzmán, D., (2011) Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling, CHANCE, American Statistical Association, 24, (3), Alexandria, VA. 

Françoise Roth, Tamy Guberek, and Amelia Hoover Green. "Using Quantitative Data to Assess Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Colombia: Challenges and Opportunities." A report by the Benetech Human Rights Program and Corporación Punto de Vista. 22 March 2011.

Guberek, T., Daniel Guzmán, Beatriz Vejarano. "Using Cemetery Information in the Search for the Disappeared: Lessons from a Pilot Study in Rionegro, Antioquia." In Methodological Proposals for Documenting and Searching for Missing Persons in Colombia. EQUITAS, 2010. (Available in Spanish)

Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball, “To Count the Uncounted: An Estimation of Lethal Violence in Casanare,” A Report by the Benetech Human Rights Program. 10 February 2010. (Available in Spanish)

Silva, Romesh, Jeff Klingner and Scott Weikart, "State Coordinated Violence in Chad under Hissène Habré: A Statistical Analysis of Reported Prison Mortality in Chad's DDS Prisons and Command Responsibility of Hissène Habré, 1982-1990." A Report by Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group to Human Rights Watch and the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression and Crimes. 29 January 2010. (Available in French)

Fruchterman, James R., Developing Infiormation Technology to Meet Social Needs, published in Innovations, a journal published by MIT Press, Summer 2008.

Cibelli, Kristen, Amelia Hoover, and Jule Krüger. 2009. "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission," a Report by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech and Annex to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia. Palo Alto, California. Benetech.

Critical Report Analyzes Sri Lanka's Disappeared —October 27, 2007

Romesh Silva, a statistician for Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group, has co-authored a report that synthesizes the voices of 633 families and relatives of disappearance victims throughout Sri Lanka using descriptive statistical analysis. The report, "Clarifying the Past and Commemorating Sri Lanka's Disappeared: A Descriptive Analysis of Enforced Disappearances Documented by Families of the Disappeared" was written in collaboration with the non-governmental human rights organization, Families of the Disappeared (FoD) and the International Center for Transitional Justice.

The report is part of an ongoing initiative to create a massive, objective and undeniable statistical record of past and present human rights violations in Sri Lanka. This project aims to augment human rights monitoring and reporting by non-governmental groups in order to positively influence the Sri Lankan peace process. By ensuring that arguments about the total magnitude, pattern and levels of responsibility associated with mass violations are informed by science, human rights debates about truth and accountability will be enriched.

Benetech CEO Co-authors Groundbreaking Paper on Expansion Capital Strategies For Social Enterprises — April 3, 2007

Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman has co-authored a groundbreaking paper that analyzes the financial challenges faced by maturing Social Enterprises that seek access to expansion capital. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Addressing the Critical Gaps in Risk-Taking Capital for Social Enterprise was co-written with Jed Emerson, a Senior Fellow with the Generation Foundation of Generation Investment Management and Tim Freundlich, the Director of Strategic Development at the Calvert Social Investment Foundation.

Benetech HRDAG Analyzes Key Data for Bangladesh Human Rights Report — December 14, 2006, New York, NY

A report issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented abuses committed by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime force that has been implicated in alleged torture and unlawful killings of people in custody.

The statistical analysis presented in the report, "Judge, Jury, and Death: Torture and Executions by Bangladesh's Elite Security Force," was conducted by Romesh Silva, a statistician with the Benetech Human Rights Program. The report concludes that between June 2004 and October 2006, the RAB killed at least 367 people in Bangladesh and tortured hundreds more.

Benetech's statistical analysis helped HRW explain the statistical patterns of the killings over time and with respect to the specific units with the RAB that were most responsible for the violence.

Benetech Publishes Essay on Human Rights in China — July 5, 2006, Palo Alto, CA

The China Rights Forum published an essay in their July issue written by Patrick Ball, the director of Benetech's Human Rights Program and Ann Harrison, Benetech's Communications Director. The essay, entitled Asking and Answering Hard Questions: Technology in the Service of Human Rights noted that human rights analysts can use tools adopted from computer science, mathematics, statistics and demography to transform human rights arguments from political polemic to a scientific debate. The authors assert that the job of human rights investigators is to gather all data that can possibly be relevant and store it in a way that is accessible to colleagues, secure from perpetrators and difficult to destroy. The China Rights Forum is the Journal of the international Chinese non-governmental organization, Human Rights In China, which promotes universally recognized human rights and advances the institutional protection of these rights in the People's Republic of China.

Benetech Op-Ed on Violence in Timor-Leste — July 31, 2006, Palo Alto, CA

The Benetech Initiative today released an Op-Ed thanking the Australian military for defending the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) during the recent violence in Dili and urging the United Nations not to squander the opportunity for accountability in Timor-Leste.

Recent articles and press coverage:

Public Radio Profiles Benetech Bookshare Service — January 3, 2013

San Francisco's local Public Radio station aired a story during its morning news program describing how school districts are using the Benetech Bookshare service to provide accessible books for students with print disabilities. The story notes that Bookshare's digital books are also used by students with learning disabilities who use the accessible texts to increase their reading comprehension.

Entitled Tool Designed for Blind Students Proves Useful For Others Too, the story aired by KQED featured Benetech Engineer Rob Turner who describes how Bookshare's digital books use the DAISY format to help readers, navigate within the texts.

"It allows someone who's reading an electronic book to have anchor points they can quickly move to," Turner explains, "beginnings of chapters, beginnings of sections, specific pages, that sort of thing."

The broadcast added that Benetech aims to convince large textbook publishers to create all their materials in this accessible digital format – and that the U.S. Department of Education has granted Benetech $6.5 million a year for the next 10 years to help meet this goal.

Benetech Included in HuffPo Gifting Guide to Tech Charities — December 4, 2012

The Huffington Post featured Benetech in its roundup of tech charities for readers to consider on Giving Tuesday – the Tuesday after the Black Friday shopping day. As the story explains, Giving Tuesday was first declared in August 2012 by Henry Timms, an organizer at New York's 92nd Street Y. The day has been backed by companies such as Microsoft and J.P. Morgan Chase. Benetech is included in a slideshow of worthy organizations profiled in the story which also features Wikipedia.org, One Laptop Per Child and Barefoot College. Here's what HuffPo has to say about Benetech.

"Human rights violations? There's an app for that. Benetech creates software and web-based programs for environmental, literacy and social justice advocates around the world. Donate to these guys every day you wish the world's do-gooders were better-endowed and watch your wishful thinking become reality."

Benetech Bookshare Service Profiled by San Jose Mercury News Tech Columnist — November 20, 2012

The Benetech Bookshare service was profiled by technology columnist Larry Magid in the San Jose Mercury News, the daily newspaper of Silicon Valley. The story, entitled Bookshare: A non-profit with a 21st Century Vision for Accessible Reading Material tells the history of Bookshare from the perspective of Benetech founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman.

The column notes that some electronic book readers, including earlier versions of the Kindle ebook reader, are capable of reading digitized text aloud. But not all books support that feature partially due to objections from authors and publishers who worry that the feature will reduce sales of audio books.

"Fruchterman hopes Bookshare's specialized library will someday be less necessary, but that won't happen until all new books become available in an open digital format that can be accessed by Braille readers, text-to-speech software and large screen reading programs," writes Magid. "Just as we now have lending libraries, we'll still need Bookshare to make sure that people with disabilities can get those books for free."

Stanford Social Innovation Review Covers Benetech's Poet Application — November 13, 2012
Poet Supports Crowdsourced Image Descriptions in Accessible Books

The Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) has published a profile of Benetech's Poet open source web application which allows users to create and edit crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities.

Published in the fall issue of SSIR, the story notes that fewer than five percent of published books, including textbooks, are available in accessible formats and even in these texts, graphics, formulas and photos are often labeled only as "image." Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and is also compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format.

Before this initiative, critical illustrations in math and science books could only be studied by those reading traditional texts. "Just because books are electronic doesn't mean they are accessible," notes vice president and general manager of the Benetech Literacy Program, Betsy Beaumon, in the SSIR story. "You can't fully learn a topic without access to graphics and images."

The SSIR article includes Beaumon's further observation that existing solutions such as tactile graphics are expensive to produce and don't work well for every type of image. Assigning a person to sit next to an individual learner and describe images is not a scalable solution. Beaumon notes in the story that Poet brings a human solution to a technical challenge. "It's not just a matter of describing an image," Beaumon explains. "For educational materials, you also need to understand What is the student supposed to learn?"

"Crowdsourcing should make descriptions even better as volunteers improve on each other's descriptions," notes the SSIR story. "This summer, for instance, 19 Google volunteers teamed up on image descriptions. In four hours, they wrote more than 1,200 descriptions for graphics in four textbooks."

About Poet
Poet was developed by the DIAGRAM Center which is dramatically changing the way image and graphic content for accessible educational materials is produced and accessed. The DIAGRAM Center was launched in May 2010 by Benetech with support from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). The Center is managed by Benetech in partnership with the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) and U.S. Fund for DAISY (USFDAISY).

Benetech's Patrick Ball Profiled in Israeli Newspaper — October 9, 2012

Dr. Patrick Ball, Benetech's Chief Scientist and Director of its Human Rights Program, has been profiled in the Israeli daily business newspaper the Calcalist. The story which was published in Hebrew, highlighted Dr. Ball's work with the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group. It noted Ball's expert testimony in the prosecution of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloševic at the ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

Bookshare Profiled by Sound Prints Radio Show — October 3, 2012

The Benetech Bookshare service has been profiled by the Sound Prints radio program which covers news, issues, products and resources of interest to blind and visually impaired people. A production of the Kentucky Council of the Blind (KCB), Sound Prints is heard live on WKJK AM in Louisville, livestreamed on talkradioradio1080.com, iHeartRadio.com, and iBlinkradio.com, and rebroadcast on ACB radio Mainstream acbradio.org.

Hosted by Greater Louisville Council of the Blind President and American Council of the Blind Treasurer Carla Ruschival, Bookshare was represented on the program by Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Benetech Literacy Program. The discussion covered a number of reading tools including Bookshare's Read2Go DAISY readers for iPad, iPhone and iTouch and the Go Read accessible e-book reader for Android.

Asked by a caller if Bookshare took scanned books from volunteers, Beaumon said the library welcomed new volunteers and would gladly received their scanned material. "There are lots of great Bookshare volunteers out there," said Beaumon. "I want to throw out a thank you because we owe our service to you."

San Francisco ABC Affiliate Airs Segment Profiling the Benetech Poet Tool — August 9, 2012
Describes How Poet Supports Crowdsourcing of Image Descriptions in Accessible Books

San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV has broadcast a story profiling Benetech's Poet open source web application. Poet supports the creation and editing of crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. Entitled, Power of Crowdsourcing Helps Blind See the Internet, reporter Jonathan Bloom interviewed Rob Turner who serves as a Customer Support Specialist for Benetech's accessible Bookshare library. Turner read an e-book on his iPhone using a digital Braille display and noted that many readers with a print disability have little information about the content of pictures in books.

The story also featured an interview with Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Benetech Literacy Program who explained that the ability to access images in e-books is critical to ensure that students with print disabilities have equal access to education. "A lot of students who are blind are discouraged from studying math and science because, primarily the images, but also the math which are often depicted in images, are just too difficult for people to get described at a school level," said Beaumon.

Developed by Benetech's DIAGRAM Center, Poet can help level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers with disabilities. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will also be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format.

Benetech CEO Featured in Skoll Foundation Video — July 9, 2012

The Skoll Foundation has posted a story and a video on their website that features Benetech founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman. The story was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business Program. Entitled "Jim Fruchterman Now Matching High Tech Workers with Nonprofit Needs," the video explores how mid-sized businesses can engage in social good. Interviewed by blogger Steve Farnsworth, Jim suggests that companies consider licensing their technology to social enterprises to help ensure that it reaches those who need it most.

Jim also recommends that companies with employee engagement programs consider Benetech's SocialCoding4Good which allows participants to contribute their technology skills to open source software projects for social good. Through this program, Benetech is matching software industry professionals to projects at SocialCoding4Good partners including Code for America, FrontlineSMS, and Mozilla Webmaker.

Benetech Founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman to Appear on Public Radio — June 7, 2012

Benetech founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman will be interviewed live Friday, June 8th on the Forum program hosted by San Francisco Public Radio station KQED 88.5 fm. The interview, which will take place at 10:00 am PST, is part of Forum's First Person Series which features leaders, innovators and other compelling people who make the Bay Area unique. Listen and call in to the program to ask Jim questions about Benetech and his pioneering work as a social entrepreneur who develops technology to meet the needs of underserved communities.

Update! Listen to the Forum interview with Jim Fruchterman here.

Benetech SocialCoding4Good Project Profiled in The Stanford Social Innovation Review — June 7, 2012

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has published a profile of Benetech's SocialCoding4Good platform which connects software developers to humanitarian free and open source projects (HFOSS) seeking volunteer expertise. The story, entitled Coding for a Better World quotes Benetech vice president of engineering Gerardo Capiel, who noted that "open-source projects are perfectly suited to volunteers," and pointed out that critical tools, such as the Firefox browser, have been developed and improved by thousands of global, collaborating programmers who donate their time.

Launched with seed funding from the Knight Foundation through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, SocialCoding4Good (SG4G) is working together with sister organizations including FrontLineSMS and The Guardian Project https://guardianproject.info/which is building tools on the Android mobile platform to create secure communications for users in high-risk conditions. "We want to pair up the right developer with the right project," Capiel told the Stanford Social Innovation Review. "We're breaking projects into small bits so that it's easy for lots of people to collaborate."

SC4G recently joined with Geeks Without Bounds as the first Random Hacks of Kindness Sustainability Partners. This initiative will provide acceleration and mentorship opportunities to high potential open source software projects developed at the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) global hackathons. These partnerships recognize that projects conceived and created at RHoK events must be sustained and supported beyond hackathons to ensure real world adoption and impact.

San Francisco News Broadcast Covers Benetech Bookshare Anniversary — March 23, 2012

Channel 7, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, has broadcast a story about the 10th anniversary of the Benetech Bookshare library. The story includes comments from Bookshare founder and Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman. "We built this for blind people and then we surveyed our users and we found a bunch of our users were actually people who weren't blind," Fruchterman told Channel 7. "They have dyslexia and they learn differently." Read more about the Bookshare anniversary here.

NPR Show Profiles Benetech's Dr. Patrick Ball — March 19, 2012

The National Public Radio program On The Media has aired an interview with Dr. Patrick Ball, Benetech chief scientist and Vice President of the Benetech Human Rights Program. Speaking with On The Media co-host Bob Garfield, Dr. Ball discussed why accuracy is paramount when calculating the number of people killed in crimes against humanity. They talked about why direct reporting and mathematically reliable estimates should be used together to estimate the number of deaths during a conflict — and why reporters should try to confirm the accuracy of body counts. Dr. Ball pointed out that it is critical to establish not just the number of people killed in a conflict, but how those deaths are distributed over time and space and by perpetrator, ethnicity and other factors.

Garfield asked Dr. Ball if he had become inured to the human loss beneath the statistics and if he "had lost or gained humanity" while estimating deaths. "I don't know if I've lost or gained humanity looking at these numbers for twenty years," replied Dr. Ball. "But I make a big effort every time I look at a data set to remember that its not a data point, it is someone who had hopes and dreams, was trying to accomplish something in their lives, and had people who they loved and who loved them, and their life was cut short by violence."

San Francisco News Broadcast Covers Benetech Bookshare Anniversary — March 23, 2012

Channel 7, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, has broadcast a story about the 10th anniversary of the Benetech Bookshare library. The story includes comments from Bookshare founder and Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman. "We built this for blind people and then we surveyed our users and we found a bunch of our users were actually people who weren't blind," Fruchterman told Channel 7. "They have dyslexia and they learn differently." Read more about the Bookshare anniversary here.

Director of the Benetech Human Rights Program Profiled by Foreign Policy Magazine — March 2, 2012
Dr. Patrick Ball Changed How the World Perceives Patterns of Violence

Foreign Policy Magazine has published a detailed article about Dr. Patrick Ball, the Director of the Benetech Human Rights Program. The story, entitled The Body Counter, notes that Ball has worked with dozens of truth commissions, tribunals, and investigatory bodies where his data analysis methods have changed how the world understands mass violations of human rights.

Author Tina Rosenberg writes that Ball's work has shown that the collection of extensive testimony is not the same as knowing the truth - and that there are many opportunities to skew data through flawed collection and analysis. Ball notes in the article that most human rights violations are secret and most violence is not public. A database of information gathered via cell phone, for instance, is only a collection of public violence. "You can do precise statistics about what's in your database," says Ball, "and may be completely wrong about the world."

Rosenberg notes that Ball's statistical methods have extracted the magnitude and patterns of violence to lift the fog of war. She concludes that accurate measurement is vital because data about the number and patterns of atrocities influences decisions about where to put money, political support and troops.

"Traditionally, human rights work has been more akin to investigative reporting, but Ball is the most influential of a handful of people around the world who see that world not in terms of words, but of figures," writes Rosenberg. "His specialty is applying quantitative analysis to mountains of anecdotes, finding the correlations that coax out a story that cannot easily be dismissed."

Analytics Magazine Interviews Benetech's Dr. Megan Price — November 2011

Analytics Magazine described the work of Benetech's Human Rights Program (HRP) in Vijay Mehrotra's regular column "Analyze This!" Mehrotra spoke with Benetech's Dr. Megan Price about the analytics revolution happening in human rights research and how HRP has been applying rigorous scientific methods to human rights data challenges for the past twenty years.

Open Source Site Covers Martus — November 14, 2011

LWN, an online technical news site popular with the Linux and open source software community, has posted an article about Benetech's Martus software. The author of the story, Dave Neary, reports that he spoke with Benetech's Dr. Jeff Klingner at the Open World Forum in Paris where Klingner was presenting. According to the story, Klingner noted during his talk that, "NGOs [Non-governmental organizations] who use Martus have confidence in the security of our software because it's open source."

Engineering for Change Interviews Benetech's Dr. Patrick Ball — October 17, 2011

An interview with Benetech's Chief Scientist, Dr. Patrick Ball, has been posted by the humanitarian group Engineering for Change (E4C). The article, entitled Five questions with Patrick Ball discusses the text-centric database that Ball is developing for the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and why it is important to account for selection bias when analyzing patterns of violence.

Statistical Journal Publishes Account of Testimony By Benetech Statistician — September 30, 2011
Daniel Guzmán Describes Analysis of Guatemalan Human Rights Data Used In Landmark Trial

CHANCE, a quarterly journal published by the American Statistical Association, has published an article by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán which recounts his testimony in a legal case that set a historic precedent for human rights in Guatemala. Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling describes Guzmán's presentation of key evidence in the trial of two former Guatemalan National Police agents accused of forcibly disappearing 26-year-old student and union leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984. Both officers were later convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Guzmán's testimony to the court was based on his analysis of random samples drawn from the millions of documents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive. The archive was found by chance in an explosives storehouse in 2005 and contains an estimated 80 million sheets, of paper. Many of the police documents were created during the country's internal armed conflict from 1960 to 1996, during which tens of thousands of Guatemalans disappeared. Guzmán's article describes how he defended his statistical findings and worked with the archive staff, prosecutors and fellow members of the Benetech Human Data Analysis Group to present the data.

Geek is Chic — August 23, 2011

Forbes contributor Tom Coughlin talks about Benetech and CEO Jim Fructherman in his column about the IEEE Sections Congress.

How Benetech Slays Monsters With Megabytes and Math — April 10, 2011

A story in Fast Company describes how Benetech’s Human Rights Program specializes in cloud-based storage of corruption evidence and employs sophisticated statistical techniques that bring dictators to justice.

Human Rights Program Featured on PBS NewsHour — March 25, 2011

The PBS NewsHour has broadcast two extensive stories about Benetech and its Human Rights and Bookshare programs. The first story To Combat Human Rights Abuses, California Company Looks to Computer Code notes that Martus software is used to secure sensitive human rights data such as the type of information about abuses that have recently been documented in the Middle East. The story also notes that Benetech's Bookshare library allows people with disabilities to access 95,000 copyrighted digital books in accessible formats. The second PBS story, The Panic Button: High-Tech Protection for Human Rights Investigators explains that Martus includes a "panic button" feature that allows users in threatening situations to delete all data and even the program itself with one keystroke. Unlike other "panic button" applications designed for cell phones, Martus allows users to securely back up their information to secure, remote, publicly available servers. This allows users to retrieve their data when it's safe to do so.

As the PBS stories note, the data collected by Martus is used to hold perpetrators accountable for large scale human rights violations. "The data itself can help build a case against a regime, and in some cases may be as valuable as eyewitness testimony, proving documented patterns of unethical behavior by police or the leader himself," PBS reports. "In Guatemala, which had a bloody civil war in the '80s and '90s, for example, Benetech's program, called Martus, was used to help sift through a huge secret police archive that included records of people killed or disappeared. Two police officials were tried and convicted — so far — as a result of the information gathered by the software program, and analyzed by Benetech experts."

Jim Fruchterman Profiled by San Francisco Chronicle — February 1, 2011

Benetech founder and CEO Jim Fruchterman has been profiled in a story by the San Francisco Chronicle. The article, which is entitled Technology His Launchpad for Literacy, Human Rights, looks at Jim's work as an engineer and his creation of Benetech. The story notes that Benetech only takes on projects where it sees the potential for revolutionary change, applying the technology and business strategies of Silicon Valley to social needs.

"The status quo approach in philanthropy is incremental change," Fruchterman told the Chronicle. "The nature of the tech industry is: How do we make people 5 times more effective? How do we give them capabilities they never had before?"

Large Print Books Profiles Bookshare Member Jessica Pinto — June 29, 2010

Large Print Books has profiled Bookshare member Jessica Pinto and linked to a YouTube video of Jessica and her mother.

Radio Canada Covers HRDAG Chad Report — May 23, 2010

In a story entitled "Hissène Habré, le Pinochet Africain," Radio Canada covered the study by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) showing that former Chadian president Hissène Habré was well informed of the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by his security forces. Read more about this report here.

Foreign Policy Magazine Posts Story about HRDAG Chad Study — March 9, 2010

Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, has written an article in Foreign Policy magazine entitled "Inside a Dictator's Secret Police," which cites an HRDAG report on human rights violations in Chad. The HRDAG study, "State Coordinated Violence in Chad under Hissène Habré, A Statistical Analysis of Reported Prison Mortality in Chad's DDS Prisons and Command Responsibility of Hissène Habré, 1982-1990," shows that former Chadian president Hissène Habré had detailed information about the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by his state security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS).

The HRDAG report is based on thousands of documents generated by the DDS itself. The analysis could be critical in the long delayed prosecution of Habré who has been accused of killing and systematically torturing thousands of political opponents from 1982 to 1990. Read more about this report here.

Colombian Press Reports on HRDAG Analysis of Violence in Casanare — February 23, 2010

The Colombia Reports news site has reported on an HRDAG study analyzing violence in the Colombian department or state of Casanare from 1998 to 2007. Entitled "NGO Seeks to Stop Conflict Victims Falling Through the Cracks," the story documents HRDAG's February 2010 study analyzing the patterns of violence in Casanare. The study uses a technique called Multiple Systems Estimation (MSE) to calculate the magnitude of these violations. By analyzing multiple datasets containing all known cases of violence, HRDAG analysts were able to estimate the number of killings and disappearances in Casanare that were never recorded. Read more about this study here.

AP Quotes HRDAG's Patrick Ball on Haiti Victim Statistics — February 11, 2010

The Associated Press has quoted HRDAG director Patrick Ball regarding efforts to estimate the number of victims impacted by the earthquake in Haiti. The story includes Ball's observation that accurate data on victims is extremely difficult to gather in such circumstances. "One of the things that distinguishes a disaster like this is a complete breakdown in communications infrastructure," said Ball. "So how are they going to know the difference between who is dead and who is missing?"

HRDAG Chad Analysis Covered In Huffington Post Story — February 10, 2010

In story for the Huffington Post news site entitled "Justice Denied In Africa," Human Rights Watch spokesperson Reed Brody cites HRDAG's study showing that former Chadian president Hissène Habré was well informed of the hundreds of deaths that occurred during his regime in prisons operated by the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS) state security force.

"A report on the documents released last week by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group of the Benetech Initiative found 'a clear communication and command link' between Habré and the DDS and showed that Habré received 1,265 direct communications from the DDS about the status of 898 detainees," writes Brody. "The documents listed 1,208 dead prisoners, confirming what victims told me — that most of those who entered Habré's dungeons, including one at the presidential compound, never came out alive." Read more about this report here.

Radio Netherlands Covers the Case Against Hissène Habré — February 10, 2010

Radio Netherlands has broadcast a story about the case against former Chadian president Hissène Habré. The report includes information about the recent study released by HRDAG showing that Habré received detailed information about the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by his state security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS). Read more about this report here.

Human Rights Watch Cites HRDAG Analysis — January 29, 2010

Key analysis from Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) was cited in a press release from Human Rights Watch on a complaint filed by torture survivors and the families of those who died from torture during the regime of former Chadian leader Hissène Habré's. The complaint charged Habré with crimes against humanity and torture and asked a Senegalese prosecutor to investigate their claims and file formal charges against Habré.

The case is based on documentary evidence and well as the testimony of victims and those who worked for Habré. The complaint alleges that Habré created and controlled a political police force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), which systematically tortured political opponents and members of ethnic groups perceived as hostile to his regime. In 2001, Human Rights Watch discovered a cache of DDS files in its abandoned headquarters in N'Djamena, Chad. Among the tens of thousands of documents were daily lists of prisoners and deaths in detention, interrogation reports, surveillance reports, and death certificates. A preliminary analysis of the data by HRDAG showed that a total of 12,321 different victims were mentioned in the documents, including the deaths in detention of 1,208 individuals.

Christian Science Monitor Covers HRDAG Comments on Human Security Report — January 25, 2010

The Christian Science Monitor has quoted HRDAG director Patrick Ball in a story which examines the recently released Human Security Report. The story, entitled "New Study Argues War Deaths Are Often Overestimated" notes that Ball agrees with the authors of the report who assert that estimates made by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) of deaths due to conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo are flawed.

But in the blog item posted below, HRDAG researchers question the HSR claim that "nationwide mortality rates actually fall during most wars" and that "today's wars rarely kill enough people to reverse the decline in peacetime mortality that has been underway in the developing world for more than 30 years."

Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball write that they are deeply skeptical of the methods and data used by the HSR authors to conclude that conflict-related deaths are decreasing. "We believe that the authors should examine their own data on mortality related deaths with the same rigor with which they critique the recent IRC surveys," write the HRDAG researchers. "If they did this, they would find that they have inadequate information to conclude anything about the trend in war-related lethality in recent decades." HRDAG's concerns about the estimates of war deaths by the HSR authors are discussed by noted statistician Andrew Gelman on his blog.

Jeune Afrique Publishes Story on Violations During Habré Regime — January 2010

The news magazine Jeune Afrique has published a story about the analysis of human rights violations which occurred during the regime of form Chadian president Hissène Habré. The story cites the report released by HRDAG showing that Habré knew about the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by his state security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS). Read more about this report here.

Mother Jones Covers Benetech's Martus Software — January 2010

In a story about ex-patriot Burmese men in Thailand who document human rights violations in Burma, Mother Jones included information about Benetech's Martus secure database software. The story, "For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question," reports that Martus is used by Bumese human rights activists to collect and encypt information about human rights violations in Burma. You can read the entire story here.

Congressional Quarterly Features Benetech in Truth Commissions Report — January 2010

A Global Researcher report on truth commissions published by Congressional Quarterly offers an extensive profile of Patrick Ball, the Director of Benetech's Human Rights Program. The report, entitled, "Truth Commissions: Can Countries Heal After Atrocities?" features a subsection on page ten entitled, "Finding Out What Really Happened: Statistician separates fact from fiction for truth commissions." The story reports that the essence of Ball's job is the ability to see ordinary material as statistical data. "'Everything is data to us," he says. "A pile of scrungy paper from border guards - 690 pages - that's data."

The story goes on to note that Ball's team finds data, codes it, analyzes and interprets it. But statistics is a world of careful hypotheses, not bold proclamations. "Data," says Ball, "is what we're able to observe. That's not the same as what is true."

Chronicle of Philanthropy Features Comments From Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman — January 7, 2010

In a story entitled, "Charity and Business Will Blend in New Ways by 2020," Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman is quoted about the future of nonprofit organizations. "'The for-profit whose job is only to make money or the nonprofit which is a charity, those are two poles. In reality there is an entire spectrum in between them,' says Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology organization in Palo Alto, Calif. In the next 10 years, he expects changes in federal and state laws to foster the development of L3C's. 'Someone should be able to operate a business and have a social mission without getting sued by shareholders for not making the maximum [amount of] money,' he says."

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Recent presentations:

Bookshare.org for Education (B4E) Presentation to OSEP — November 2007

Presentation by Jim Fruchterman and Lisa Friendly to the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education, which awarded Benetech $32 million to provide Bookshare.org to every student with a print disability in the United States.

View presentation here
PowerPoint version

HRDAG Statistician Advisors Speak In Guatemala City &mdash August 7, 2007, Guatemala City, Guatemala

August 7, 2007 — Statisticians Paul Zador and Gary Shapiro, who have provided pro bono technical assistance to Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), gave a presentation today in Guatemala City entitled "The Application of Statistics to Human Rights Violation Research." They were joined by HRDAG statistician Daniel Guzmán who also spoke.

Zador and Shapiro, who are members of the American Statistical Association, have consulted to HRDAG on the scientific sampling method used at the National Police Archive project. The estimated 80 million records in the archive contain critical information about police procedures during Guatemala's 36 years of armed internal conflict that resulted in 200,000 deaths and disappearances. The archive is the largest single cache of documents made available to human rights investigators in Latin America.

The event was hosted by the United Nations Development Program and the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman which is overseeing the archive project.

World Summit on the Information Society — November 15, 2005

Text of remarks by Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia. The focus of the speech was on building a global digital library for people with print disabilities.
Read Jim Fruchterman's speech to the World Summit on the Information Society (PDF)

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Recent white papers:

Comments on Accessibility of Google Print and Google's Library Project

Google's recent announcement of massive library digitization partnerships has generated a huge amount of interest and angst in the print disabled community, and brought focus on the Google Print program. This short white paper aims to illuminate the issues and set the stage for future discussions with Google. Google has not approved this paper, although we hope they will use it as a tool in advancing accessibility.

Download the article (PDF)

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