Pioneer 2010 awards

Cory Doctorow, Master of Ceremonies
November 8, 2010, 7:30 PM
Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco

EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Please join us in congratulating the 2010 Pioneer Award Winners:



Steven Aftergood
Transparency Activist

James Boyle
Public Domain Scholar

Pamela Jones and the Groklaw Website
Legal Blogging

Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru
E-voting Researcher

EFF will honor the winners at our 2010 Pioneer Awards Fundraiser on Monday, November 8th, at 111 Minna Gallery. Award-winning author and activist Cory Doctorow will keynote the event, and the celebration will include drinks, light refreshments and excellent company.

A VIP event with Cory Doctorow, the Pioneer Award winners, EFF founders and board members, and other luminaries will begin at 6:30 PM.

Pioneer Award candidates were nominated by the public. The winners were chosen by an independent judging panel, listed below.

Save money by purchasing tickets in advance at eff.org/pioneerfundraiser

Special thanks to our sponsors:



Consumer Electronics Association Junk Email Filter

Judging Panel

EFF would like to thank the Judging Panel for the 2010 Pioneer Awards:

Kim Alexander
President and founder, California Voter Foundation

Jim Buckmaster
CEO, Craigslist

Cory Doctorow
Award-winning author and activist

Mitch Kapor
President, Kapor Enterprises; co-founder and former chairman, EFF

Drazen Pantic
Co-director, Location One

Barbara Simons
Computer scientist, IBM Research (retired); former president, ACM

James Tyre
Co-founder, The Censorware Project; EFF policy fellow

Past Pioneers

2009: Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti, Carl Malamud

2008: Mitchell Baker, Michael Geist, Mark Klein

2007: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier

2006: Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales

2005: Mitch Kapor, Edward Felten, and Patrick Ball

2004: Kim Alexander, David Dill, and Aviel Rubin

2003: Amy Goodman, Eben Moglen, David Sobel

2002: Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, Jon Johansen and Writers of DeCSS

2001: Bruce Ennis, Seth Finkelstein, and Stephanie Perrin

2000: "Librarians Everywhere", Tim Berners-Lee and Phil Agre

1999: Jon Postel, Drazen Pantic, and Simon Davies

1998: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Barbara Simons

1997: Hedy Lamarr, Johan Helsingius, and Marc Rotenberg

1996: Robert Metcalfe, Peter Neumann, Shabbir Safdar and Matthew Blaze

1995: Philip Zimmermann, Anita Borg, and Willis Ware

1994: Ivan Sutherland, Bill Atkinson, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lee Felsenstein, and the WELL

1993: Paul Baran, Vinton Cerf, Ward Christensen, Dave Hughes and the USENET software developers

1992: Douglas C. Engelbart, Robert Kahn, Jim Warren, Tom Jennings, and Andrzej Smereczynski

Photos from the 2009 Awards

EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards EFF Pioneer Awards

Event photos by Quinn Norton.

Biographies of the Pioneer Award Winners

Steven Aftergood directs the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of official secrecy and to promote public access to government information. He writes and edits Secrecy News, an email newsletter and blog that reports on new developments in secrecy and disclosure policy. Secrecy News also provides direct public access to various official records that have been suppressed, withdrawn, or that are simply hard to find. In 1997, Mr. Aftergood was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency that successfully led to the declassification and publication of the total intelligence budget for the first time in 50 years.

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. Professor Boyle is recognized for his exceptional scholarship on the "second enclosure movement" the worldwide expansion of intellectual property rights and its threat to the rich public domain of cultural and scientific materials that the Internet might otherwise make available. An original board member of Creative Commons and co-founder of Science Commons, Professor Boyle has worked for over 20 years as both an academic and institution builder to celebrate and protect the values of cultural and scientific openness.

When Pamela Jones created Groklaw in 2003, she envisioned a new kind of participatory journalism and distributed discovery a place where programmers and engineers could educate lawyers on technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free and Open Source community, and in turn where technologists could learn about how the legal system works. Groklaw quickly became an essential resource for understanding such important legal debates as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU anti-trust case against Microsoft, whether software should qualify for patent protection, software licensing, and the OOXML/ODF.

Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru is a security researcher in India who recently revealed security flaws in India's paperless electronic voting machines. He has endured jail time, repeated interrogations, and ongoing political harassment to protect an anonymous source that enabled him to conduct the first independent security review of India's electronic voting system. Prasad spent a year trying to convince election officials to complete such a review, but they insisted that the government-made machines were "perfect" and "tamperproof." Instead, Prasad's international team discovered serious flaws that could alter national election results. Months of hot debate have produced a growing consensus that India's electronic voting machines should be scrapped, and Prasad hopes to help his country build a transparent and verifiable voting system.