Gerardo Capiel
VP of Engineering, Benetech

Benetech is a nonprofit (501c3) software company addressing large scale and global needs in literacy, human rights and the environment. Our Literacy Program enables over 230K people with print disabilities (e.g. blindness, dyslexia) have access to books and textbooks via Bookshare – the largest library of accessible e-books with over 175K titles. In our Human Rights Program, we have developed Martus, which is a secure information management system that protects over 200K witness testimonies and other evidence of human rights abuses. And in our Environment Program, over 5,000 environmentalists use our open source Miradi software to manage and measure their conservation projects in over 100 countries .

Benetech’s newest project is SocialCoding4Good . The project connects software development professionals interested in volunteering their skills with nonprofits that are creating humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS). This opportunity was identified through Benetech’s challenges with building volunteer developer communities around its open source software projects in literacy, human rights and environmental conservation management and measurement.

By using the SocialCoding4Good website software development professionals will be able to search for HFOSS projects that are a match with their skills, project needs and availability. On the other side, nonprofits, social enterprises and governmental agencies will be able to list their HFOSS projects, specify their timing and skill requirements and evaluate volunteers based on feedback/badges from other nonprofit or open source communities.