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

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

Fall 2002

Benetech has had an outstanding year as our momentum continues to grow. The last few months have been notable for the international recognition Benetech has received, as well as the growing financial support for our existing and new projects. Each month marks increasing activity and excitement as disadvantaged communities, foundations, philanthropists and technologists get more and more excited about Benetech and our approach to social applications of technology.

Highlights include:

The Schwab Foundation recognized us with a Social Entrepreneur of 2003 award, providing us with the opportunity to interact with the world's top social entrepreneurs and the opportunity to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos as a participant. Furthermore, I was just asked to be a speaker at Davos as well!
Bookshare.org continues to grow with more than 1,000 people signed up and over 11,000 books available to download. We recently received a $195,500 grant from the Lavelle Fund for the Blind, which will support a New York metro area pilot and grow both our collection and membership more rapidly.
Bookshare.org was recognized in the International Stockholm Challenge as the best educational information technology project of the year. Chosen from among 600 IT projects from 78 different countries, Bookshare.org won the Education category.
Martus, our human rights monitoring and documentation project, is completing a six-month beta testing period in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Russia and Eastern Europe. On track to launch in December, Martus provides international activists with the information technology tool needed to document and publicize violations. With Martus, the most powerful weapon against human rights violations - the truth - becomes much more widely available.
Benetech received significant unrestricted support from the Skoll Community Fund that provides us with the funding to explore new projects for the future.
I had the opportunity to speak at the United Nations about Benetech in a session on technology and development.

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Schwab Award

The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship honored us greatly this year by their award, which comes with significant financial support for our involvement with the World Economic Forum and participation in this global community of top social entrepreneurs from dozens of countries. I have already attended a Social Entrepreneurs Summit in Geneva this year and look forward to the Davos meeting of the WEF, with the exciting opportunity to speak about Benetech with top business, government and nonprofit leaders. If you know someone who will be attending who you think would appreciate the opportunity to hear about Benetech for ten or fifteen minutes, please let me know! More information about the Schwab award is available in our press release.

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Bookshare.org

Bookshare.org is growing well after its launch in February. The grant from the Lavelle Fund is the first of what we expect will be a series of grants supporting the expansion of Bookshare.org in collection size and membership. Our largest goal is to break-even financially in 2004, and these kinds of grants are key to both bridging the financial gap and assuring we reach this goal. Winning the prestigious international IT award, the Stockholm Challenge was an unexpected honor. Students in middle and high schools are actively using Bookshare.org, and we're closely watching the pilot projects we kicked off in San Diego this fall. We're getting great feedback from students and teachers while providing nearly 200 specifically requested books that will benefit students nationwide. Our long term vision for what electronic books can do to provide book access to millions of people around the globe is set forth in a recent Benetech white paper. The excitement about this vision is growing, and we look forward to building the critical support in the author and publishing communities required to bring affordable ebooks to villages that will never be able to have a library of physical books. Access our vision here.

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Martus

Martus completed a successful beta test program and is nearing its public launch in December. It has received extensive testing in Sri Lanka (starting in July), Guatemala (August), and Russia (September), and I personally was able to install our first server outside the U.S. at the Open Society Archive in Budapest in October. Our team has been able to respond quickly to user suggestions and has implemented many new feature requests en route to completing version 1.0. Our first post-launch customer will be a coalition of human rights groups in the Philippines, funded by The Asia Foundation. Marc Levine, our Senior Product Manager for Martus, will be installing a server in Manila in January. We are gratified that The Asia Foundation has already made Benetech a grant to support this work. The Philippines program will both encourage information sharing between NGOs and the Commission on Human Rights, and enhance the security of information deemed confidential. It is also likely that we will be expanding this effort into Thailand later in 2003.

We have interest in applying Martus on every continent, and for a wide range of social justice projects. It turns out that a basic documentation and monitoring tool that is as easy to use as email and includes secure backup and communications, meets many needs across the nonprofit sector. We are also receiving continuing support from ASPiration, the Information Program of the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Archive to broaden the reach of the Martus project.

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Conclusion

The Benetech team is energized by the reaction to our latest advances in technology that serves humanity. Projects such as the Landmine Detector Project and ALL-Link continue to make progress as incubating ventures. Great new ideas from the technology sector are streaming in, and we're playing an increasingly significant role in encouraging the technical community to consider models that fall between charity and enterprises that can deliver venture capital returns. The more time we spend with the nonprofit sector, the clearer it is that Benetech is onto something big: leveraging the power of technology to address major challenges facing society.

Your continuing support is invaluable. Thanks for everything you've done to help advance the Benetech mission!

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