Jim Fruchterman — Technology for the 90%

The University of Galway is delighted to host a public lecture by Jim Fruchterman (https://fruchterman.org/), an engineer and social entrepreneur who has spent close to four decades building and scaling technology ventures for the people the market overlooks.

Fruchterman founded Benetech, growing it from an accessible-reading-technology startup into a major nonprofit organisation, and built Bookshare into the world's largest library for print-disabled readers. He also co-founded Martus, a human rights documentation tool whose data has been used as evidence in international war crimes trials. He now leads Tech Matters, a nonprofit building open-source software for the social sector, including Aselo, a platform used by crisis and child helplines worldwide, and Terraso, a tool for sustainable land management. A 2006 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and Skoll Award laureate for Social Entrepreneurship (Oxford's Saïd Business School), his work has been covered by the BBC and the New York Times. He is the author of the recent MIT Press book Technology for Good (2025), available to buy from MIT Press or open-access online under a Creative Commons licence.

This talk will speak to a wide range of interests across the University: to social entrepreneurs and those studying business, innovation and enterprise, on what it takes to build and scale a mission-driven organisation over decades; to computer scientists and engineers building AI and data systems; to those working on human rights and technology governance; and to anyone interested in how law, policy and creativity intersect with questions of access and justice.

All welcome.

This interdisciplinary event is organised by the School of Law Technology and Rights Cluster, the Discipline of Management in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, and the School of Computer Science