Benetech

Code Alliance is a Benetech initiative that connects technology professionals to volunteer opportunities with open source software projects for social good. On the first day of the CHI4GOOD conference, we brought over 40 projects to the San Jose Convention Center to participate in a hack4good Day of Service event. More than 100 developers, UX designers, and researchers came together to help our nonprofit cohort with their technological needs. The nonprofits benefitted from expert technical development work, and the volunteers were gracious, skilled, and excited to leverage their professional skills to give back...

Benetech started out in the 90s without even understanding the meaning of the term open source. They just "needed an easy way to interface with different voice synthesizers" to develop readers for people who are blind and "shared the code to be helpful." Sound familiar? Opensource.com started covering stories like in 2010 and they recur more often than you might think. Stories of people sharing the code to help others—but sharing code to get help developing better code. When code is open, a community has the opportunity to form around it...