The Beneblog is a weblog by Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman, on issues and ideas that affect the application of technology to unmet social needs.

Posted 04/30/2012:
Receiving the 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation

Last October, I had the pleasure and honor to visit the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, to accept on behalf of Benetech the 2011 CASE Award for Enterprising Social Innovation...


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100 Million Images From Guatemalan National Police Go Online

April 27, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — 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 100 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."

San Francisco News Broadcast Covers Benetech Bookshare Anniversary

March 23, 2012, Palo Alto, CA — 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.