I’m delighted to share what’s happened in the last year with me and Tech Matters. The biggest news: Tech Matters is now an independent nonprofit. Here are our top three activities:
Revolutionizing the work of crisis response helplines with our Aselo modern contact center technology;
Bringing tools, knowledge, and money to local communities around the world trying to thrive in the face of the climate crisis, through our soon-to-be-launched Terraso platform; and
Spin Out
We founded Tech Matters at the end of 2018. Thanks to strong support from risk-tolerant donors, and early operational support from Benetech (as our fiscal sponsor), this year found us ready to scale up our work on our own. We’re up to 29 people in 8 countries and we’ve raised over $10 million so far. We announced our formal launch as an independent 501c3 charity organization in April at the Skoll World Forum. It’s such a thrill to be back founding new tech enterprises for social good. Plus, I have more time these days to help other leaders figure out how to apply tech for maximum social impact.
Tech for Good
Since we believe so passionately in the power of technology to help the social good sector, we invest significant time in helping other people with their tech challenges and opportunities. Here are some of the major things happening in our field-building efforts:
- The Decolonize Data article I cowrote with Nithya Ramanathan of Nexleaf Analytics was among SSIR’s top ten list of most popular articles for 2022.
- The Tech Matters podcast is in the middle of production for season two.
- The Rockefeller Foundation awarded me a Bellagio residency for July where I completed a first draft my long-planned book on how to start, scale, and exit tech social enterprises (expected to be published in 2024).
- And finally, I am really excited about jumping in to help fill a giant unmet need in the tech for good field. We’re working on a lightweight data stewardship and sharing agreement – kind of a “Creative Commons” standard for ethical data collection and reuse.
Aselo: Revolutionizing Crisis Response Helplines
Aselo is firmly in the scaling up phase! We are now being used by helplines in fifteen countries, with more countries in the pipeline. We’re using modern technology to help increase the productivity of the scarcest resource in crisis response: the trained counselor.
Beyond delivering incredible bang for the buck, we get to start leveraging the Aselo platform to tackle major new problems quickly. Two examples:
- We’ve adapted Aselo to respond to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. We’ve already launched a Ukrainian language service in partnership with the Hungarian child helpline.
- Partnering with the national child sexual abuse portal NGO in India, RATI, and the Internet Watch Foundation, we’re piloting a new capability for young people victimized by the latest widespread Internet pandemic: blackmail based on the threat of non-consensual sharing of intimate selfies. Young people will be able to securely share their images and have them added to the fingerprint databases the major platforms use to stop the circulation of illegal content, effectively pre-emptively stopping the sharing of their images by bad actors. If all goes well, we’ll scale to many more countries.
Icebreaker at a school outreach event for Childline South Africa
Finally, thanks to the support of a couple of enlightened donors, we were able to bring the Aselo team to Stockholm for the first in-person global meeting of the child helplines since the idea of Aselo was first floated four years ago in Toronto. We co-hosted a meeting about the future of tech for child helplines, spotlighting innovations from the helplines themselves, and came away with lots of ideas and much inspiration for the future of Aselo!
Terraso: The Power of Software and Data for Local Climate Action
We launched our Terraso platform in June at Kenyan Landscapes Coalition meeting at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, which has been in development for just over a year. It’s been co-created in partnership with a dozen local leadership teams all over the world, who represent the thousands of local communities who desperately need better data and software to respond to the climate crisis enveloping the places where they live. Two examples of these local communities are:
ANEI, Colombia’s largest organic coffee coop, which is led by, and made up of, indigenous people. They believe that with our help in building their own impact database, they will be able to borrow more cheaply, and find ways to reap additional premiums for their crop, all while investing more in building the tech capacity of young people from their communities.
Conservation International in Guyana was our user lead in developing our story mapping capabilities, a frequent feature request. This is where a landscape tells the story of their place using multimedia on top of a satellite map of the landscape. The Guyana team believes that a compelling story map will increase community support for replacing traditional, colonial sea walls with mangrove forests to build land up rather than to lose it.
Beyond that, we’ve been delighted by the receptiveness of the agriculture field to our efforts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has asked us to reboot the Land Potential Knowledge System, their flagship soil assessment app, used by ranchers and farmers all over the U.S. and Africa. We think that bringing together great open source tools (including our partnership with OpenTEAM) to benefit local producers and local leaders is one of the biggest opportunities for tech to help with the climate crisis. There’s so much more to do!
Conclusion
You might think that after thirty years of leading Benetech, and then working in isolation through the pandemic, I might be a little tired. But no! I’m having the time of my life. Starting new enterprises and helping build incredible teams seems to be just the tonic. Here’s hoping we get to meet in person in the coming year, and work together on bringing better and more ethical tech to bear on the world’s biggest problems!
Best, Jim
