In wrapping up Season Two, Jim extends his heartfelt gratitude to our devoted listeners and the extraordinary tech nonprofit leaders who’ve shared their impactful stories. Furthermore, this season wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of our major donors, including the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Okta for Good, the Skoll Foundation, and Splunk.
Jim leaves us with a call to action: technologists and social sector workers alike are invited to pivot their skills towards meaningful impact.
Transcript
Welcome to the epilogue to Season 2 of the Tech Matters Podcast. If this was longer, we might call it episode nine, but we’re not. I’m your host, Jim Fruchterman, and I’m delighted to be here giving you my wrap-up on Season 2.
First of all, I wanna thank all of you for listening to the podcast. My goal is to spread the word about using technology for social good by tech nonprofits. My guests tend to be understated about the incredible impact they’re having on the world, bringing tech to the 90% of humanity typically ignored by Silicon Valley.
Please realize that the kind of tech innovations you hear about on the Tech Matters Podcast are not easy to deliver. Most people who try to create something brand new with tech fail, just like in regular tech. By listening to the stories of leaders and teams who overcame the odds, I hope you’ll learn from their journeys and be inspired to join this movement.
I want to thank the great tech nonprofit leaders who joined us this season as interviewees sharing the very real challenges of starting and running tech nonprofits.
—
So let’s recap. We kicked off Season 2 with a two-part episode featuring Owen Barder of Precision Development. The first part delved into market failure, and the second episode went into the details of his organization and how they’re delivering agriculture extension information to more than 5 million farmers at an incredibly affordable price.
Next, in episode three, we heard from Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, the long-time Executive Director of Skoll Award-winning organization WITNESS, about their efforts to support and strengthen the voices of human rights defenders around the world, which is especially topical given the waves of misinformation and deepfakes washing over society.
Episode four features another Skoll Award winner, Drew Sullivan, the co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project based in Sarajevo, which is an outstanding effort to support investigative journalists with the best database of international corruption on the planet.
Jake Porway, the (co)founder of DataKind, was our guest for episode five. I really enjoy speaking with Jake as the nonprofit data science counterpart to me as a software nonprofit leader. Of course, data and software are two sides of the same coin. This interview is especially topical given the current hype bubble around AI, which happens to be a bubble with some actual substance to it.
In episode six, we turned to Heejae Lim of Talking Points for an awesome example of using AI at scale to help parents who don’t speak the same language as the teachers and school staff, helping them communicate effectively about their child’s education. Heejae’s innovation was to increase student educational outcomes not by developing educational software but by increasing parental engagement, a different, and as it turns out, a very effective way to improve student outcomes.
Natalie Grillon of Open Supply Hub starred in episode seven, talking about how her team is building the best database of facilities in the global supply chain, where unique identifiers are crucial to addressing issues like unjust labor practices and the environmental footprint of the system that delivers every kind of product to meet society’s needs.
In our final interview of Season 2, we flipped the tables. Nithya Ramanathan, the founder and CEO of Nexleaf Analytics and my board chair here at Tech Matters, volunteered to interview me. Nithya took this in a very personal direction, exploring how I came from childhood to become a tech for good leader back when we didn’t know that that was a thing. And of course, I’ve already interviewed Nithya back in episode three of the first season of the Tech Matters Podcast.
Thanks again to all of these terrific nonprofit leaders for volunteering to share their stories with all of us.
—
And of course, this podcast wouldn’t be possible without the financial backing of the supporters of Tech Matters. I want to specifically highlight four major donors who came together around supporting this work: the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Okta for Good, the Skoll Foundation and Splunk, which is now part of Cisco.
—
So let me wrap up this epilogue to Season 2 with some calls to action.
Are you in tech? Are you a technologist, product marketer, data scientist? Think about moving from money to meaning and join a nonprofit to use tech to help people and the planet. You can do good, make a decent salary, but probably not get rich. Of course, you probably aren’t gonna get rich in the average for-profit startup anyway, but this way you’ll know your contributions are making a difference on the world’s biggest problems.
And, might you be working in the social sector and wanna know more about getting tech done right? Don’t assume you need to build a big chunk of custom software. Dig deeper, talk to your peers, listen to the stories in this podcast, and learn what kind of tech will help solve your biggest problems.
And what do we have planned for the coming year? A lot. First, we will be working on Season 3 of the Tech Matters Podcast. I have plenty of great nonprofit tech leaders in mind for their stories to build on the great examples of those featured in our first two seasons.
Of course, this podcast is not a standalone effort. It’s part of a research project that we’re doing for a book I’m writing on Tech for Good. I’ve signed a contract with MIT Press for this book, which features so many examples of the great Tech for Good nonprofits already featured in this podcast and more. I also dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to build sustainable tech products as a nonprofit. And the book is due out in fall 2025.
And lastly, we’ve just publicly launched the design phase of a new movement around data, called the Better Deal for Data.
Modeled after open source and open content licensing like Creative Commons, the idea of the Better Deal for Data is to create a set of guiding principles for the use of data for social good, where we promise not to sell out the people who are the subjects of the data collection, but where we can do research and create more and better representative AI datasets to benefit those people, their communities, society, and the planet.
If you have something to do about data for social good, please go to BD4D.org, read our draft principles and our white paper. You can share your data use case by filling in the blanks. You know, I want to collect this data from these people to deliver these social good outcomes, and I want to make sure that we prevent these other bad things from happening. So share your data use case with us there on that website, and you can also sign up for updates as well, and if it strikes you as, oh, we totally need an ethical alternative to surveillance capitalism, you can sign up to be publicly acknowledged as a supporter of a Better Deal for Data.
And all of this is on top of my day job at Tech Matters, helping 30 awesome tech people write and operate two major open source platforms for social impact: the Aselo contact center platform for crisis helplines and the Terraso suite of software tools for smallholders and local leaders trying to adapt to the climate crisis and build a more regenerative agriculture food system.
This short epilogue is the conclusion of Season 2 of the Tech Matters podcast. I hope this podcast helps inspire you to use tech for maximum social impact. Until next time, thanks again for listening.