Daniel Ben-Horin

Daniel Ben-Horin is an American political activist and technologist best known for founding CompuMentor, one of the first nonprofit technology assistance providers in the United States, in 1987 and guiding its growth since then. He is now co-CEO of the organization, which has been called TechSoup Global since 2008.

In 1987 with $2,500 in seed funding, Ben-Horin tapped volunteer resources on The WELL, one of the first online communities, to create CompuMentor. The early days of CompuMentor, including its birth on the WELL, are described in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold. Today, TechSoup Global has a staff of 212 and an annual operating budget of $34 million.

In his book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken writes that the “…hybridization of business, philanthropy technology and nonprofit activity is exemplified in the work of Daniel Ben-Horin...” In their 2012 book, Social Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, Ryszard Praszkier and Andrzej Nowak refer to Mr. Ben-Horin as "a social entrepreneur through and through" and use TechSoup Global as a leading example of a large, vibrant, online network.

In 2009, the Ashoka Foundation elected Ben-Horin as a Senior Fellow for his work as a “leading social entrepreneur,” and the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network NTEN gave him its "Lifetime Achievement Award." At the NTEN ceremony, the Surdna Foundation's Vincent Stehle said “… the award is given each year to a person who has pushed the nptech community forward. This push might be in the form of innovation, or thought leadership. In the case of Daniel Ben-Horin ... it's both. Everyone who works in our field owes him a debt of gratitude for revolutionizing how we get and share software and information.”

The TechSoup Global Network helps connect nonprofits from outside the U.S. to obtain donations of software, technology products, and services. Fundacja TechSoup is the first separately incorporated “regional hub” established by TechSoup Global. It employs a staff of twelve in Warsaw, Poland, and supports activities in 16 European countries (as well as playing a key role in supporting the Global Partner Network overall). Through 35 TechSoup Global Network partners, the TechSoup technology donation program is available to community-based organizations in a total of 39 countries in addition to the United States, including: Australia, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand and the United Kingdom.

From July 2001 when the TechSoup.org technology product donation service began through June 30, 2012, TechSoup.org has served more than 183,000 organizations, distributed more than 9.7 million software and hardware product donations, and enabled recipients to save more than US$3.1 billion in IT expenses in 40 countries around the world.

TechSoup Global conducts a range of programs including the operation of TechSoup.Org (providing donated technology products and information to nonprofits), the NetSquared and Nonprofits in Second Life social networking communities, and TechSoup for Libraries—helping public libraries manage public access computers. It also operates NGOsource, a joint project with the Council on Foundations, which is an equivalency determination service that will help U.S. grantmakers streamline their international grantmaking process.

Mr. Ben-Horin holds a B. A. in Psychology from the University of Chicago. From 1980-84, Ben-Horin served as the Executive Director of Media Alliance in San Francisco during which period he also taught journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 1969 to 1980, he made his living as a journalist, writing for The New York Times, The Nation,Harper's Weekly, Mother Jones, Redbook and many other publications.

In 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Nonprofit Times included him on its annual list of “50 Most Influential People in the Nonprofit Sector.” Mr. Ben-Horin was the subject of a "Boss" column in The New York Times on November 26, 2007.

In addition to guiding the evolution of TechSoup Global, Ben-Horin speaks frequently on issues related to the underserved's access to technology. Engagements include the keynote address at the ConnectingUp 2007 Conference in Australia, the closing plenary at the SANGONeT Conference and Exhibition 2007 in South Africa, and a keynote at the Telecentre Europe Summit 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey. On February 11–13, 2010, Ben-Horin spoke at Tech4Society, a 3-day international event at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. The conference brought 76 Ashoka-Lemelson Foundation Fellows together to interact with journalists, engineers, philanthropists, venture capitalists, and business leaders. Ben-Horin focused on “replication,” as distinct from “scaling,” as a critical approach to fostering the spread of innovative, socially beneficial projects. "On the replication side of the equation, I think there’s a pretty simple approach worth testing. If there’s a social problem, a proven solution, and a dynamic network, it should be possible to identify the problem solvers, expose them to other potential problem solvers, and provide a modest subsidy to support knowledge transfer throughout the network. So, in practice, this idea boils down to connecting and supporting small gatherings of potential replicators, where every participant has skin in the game."

Mr. Ben-Horin served on the panel “Social media: A fad or the future?” at the European Foundation Centre 2010 meeting in Brussels, Belgium on June 2, 2010. On September 20, 2010, Mr. Ben-Horin’s speech “The Disruptive Opportunity for Libraries” was a keynote address to the European Congress on E-Inclusion 2010 “Delivering Digital Europe in Public Libraries” conference held in the Flemish Parliament in Brussels as part of the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.

At the Grantmakers East Forum in Tbilisi, Georgia on October 26, 2010, Mr. Ben-Horin spoke on the concluding plenary panel “Disruption and Positive Deviants” moderated by Melissa Pailthorp, Microsoft Community Affairs Senior Manager for Central and Eastern Europe, and Anna Piotrovskaya, Executive Director of the Dmitry Zimin Dynasty Foundation.

On May 23, 2011, Mr. Ben-Horin provided opening remarks at Conference Sektor 3.0, organized by Stocznia (Unit for Social Innovation and Research-Shipyard), a Polish NGO funded by the Polish-American Freedom Foundation. Sektor 3.0 was the first Polish conference with a focus on the state of information technology, the NGO sector and local rural communities that allowed participants themselves to create the agenda for the meeting. In his talk, Mr. Ben-Horin emphasized the opportunities that new technologies bring for greater connectivity and resource sharing to facilitate social change. “What's true about the Arab spring, is even truer about small projects in little villages. New tools allow citizens to obtain an entirely different level of data about public officials. New tools allow them to publish this data and create a new level of pressure for change. New tools allow communication with new allies. New tools allow best practices and solutions to be shared between Tunisia, the U.S. and Poland. These truths apply to the smallest social change effort anywhere in the world.”

On June 7, 2011, Ben-Horin gave a plenary talk at the Personal Democracy Forum 2011 conference in New York City, joining participants from the federal government, major foundations, leading nonprofits, journalists, and Fortune 500 companies around the theme “Agents for Change.” In his address, “Networks of Resources, Networks of Ideas, Connecting the Dots,” he focused on TechSoup Global’s “Global Contributors’ Summit,” a 3-day conference which took place on February 15-17, 2011, bringing together global networks of organizations that need technology support, networks of corporations that are willing to donate their products, networks of funders interested in building the capacity of civil society, and networks of technical volunteers. "We realized that we can’t go it alone if we’re going to solve problems and take advantage of resources to create real change," Ben-Horin said, "so we identified our constituency and invited them all to come to San Francisco to meet with our capacity building partners … and what we’re going to do now is to use some old fashioned organizing techniques, taking statements of intent that people made at the Summit and putting them on a blog … and calling on people to make good on what they said they would do … we’re going to drive each of these conversations towards a specific project and ask did it happen, and what’s next…?” Ben-Horin reported back on the results of this process in a featured blog post for the Stanford Social Innovation Review published on July 18, 2012.

On September 6, 2012, Ben-Horin addressed a plenary session of the Civicus World Assembly. He used the occasion to describe the first Campus Party event held outside the Spanish speaking world, which he had attended two weeks before in Berlin. He told the delegates “…to consider young hackers as vital allies in social activism activities, but you have to think less about 'mobilizing' and more about 'engaging.'"

On November 21, 2011, Mr. Ben-Horin became a featured technology blogger on The Huffington Post focusing on the intersection of technology and civil society. He has written about topics as diverse as the emergence of Campus Party, an Open Government Challenge in Romania, and the intellectual property battles of author Timothy Mo.

In March 2012, Ben-Horin was one of 50 “leading social innovators” invited by Ashoka to Change Nation, in Dublin, where they met with leaders of the Irish government, business and civil society toward the goal of instilling social innovations in Ireland. Ben-Horin described his impressions of Change Nation and of related discussions with American Ambassador to Romania, Mark Gitenstein; Aga Khan Development Network official Nick McKinlay; and Central and Eastern European activists such as Vlad Atanasiu in a post on the blog entitled, “Tension and possibility—The new dynamics of change." Ben-Horin also continued to post on the Stanford Social Innovation Review, arguing that more attention should be placed on the replication of innovative advances.

In March 2006, Ben-Horin was interviewed by Mitch Nauffts, editorial director of Philanthropy News Digest. That interview, entitled “Philanthropy and the Next-Generation Web,” was published in The Foundation Center's 50th anniversary book, “Philanthropy and the 21st Century: The Foundation Center's 50th Anniversary Interviews.” In April 2008, The New York Times featured TechSoup Global in an article entitled “When Tech Innovation Has a Social Mission.”