Jim Fruchterman

Commencement speech given at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California on May 20, 2012.

Six months after leaving grad school, I found myself at a rocket launchpad for one of the very first private enterprise rocket companies. Our business manager was doing the countdown. 5-4-3-2-1, oh, BLEEP. The rocket blew up!...

I was just at the Skoll World Forum, probably the best conference in the world for meeting with top social entrepreneurs. As a longtime member of the Skoll community, I prize this week for the opportunity to talk frankly with peers about our biggest mutual challenges. Peer learning is the...

This week marked a first-ever gathering of human rights activists with Silicon Valley technology developers. The Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference hosted a series of discussions about how technology is used to expand and sometimes undermine essential freedoms around the world. Organized by the nonprofit group...

Note to US taxpayers: when we pay to offer carrots, and also pay to hit people with sticks, perhaps we shouldn't hit the people who take our carrots with sticks?

One of the top social entrepreneurs working in the Amazon is Liliana Madrigal of Amazon Conservation Team....

I recently had the chance to sit down with Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org, just as the team there was putting the finishing touches on a major website upgrade. It was a great opportunity to get insight into a new phase of online activism.

When I first...

I was just in touch with Ira Flatow of Science Friday, and heard that they were facing a funding crisis. According to Ira:

We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying...

The concept of Open Educational Resources (OERs) isn't new: we pass on to our kids what we learned from our parents or favorite teachers. Today, we are in a new world when it comes to the Internet and the ease of sharing information to help people learn. I love OERs...

How would you try to change the world if you had the chance? What would you propose to global leaders to make humanity better off? The Global Redesign Initiative is one of the core themes of next week's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

I...

Human rights and social justice groups throughout the world gather and collect large amounts of data, yet these organizations often lack the resources to document human rights violations systematically and securely. Much of their information is stored in insecure formats that prevent it from being effectively shared. Critical documentation is...

There was a time, not that long ago, when children who were blind, or had another kind of disability that prevented them from easily reading a printed book, were pretty much out of luck when it came to reading.

If a child with a print disability wanted to read a...