Purchase a Ticket for the 2011 Pioneer Awards Ceremony

We hope you will join us on November 15th to celebrate the work of this year’s winners. The celebration will include drinks, bytes, and excellent company. Tickets are available now. If you plan to bring many friends and colleagues, you might want to consider a sponsorship (pdf). We will be proud to present awards to this year's winners:

Ron Wyden
U.S. Senator and Advocate for Free Speech and Privacy Online

Ian Goldberg
Encryption Expert and Co-Founder of Off-The-Record Messaging

Nawaat.org
Co-Founders of the Influential Tunisian Blog

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. Public nominations for EFF’s 20th Annual Pioneer Awards closed on October 17th. Thank you to everyone who recommended people and organizations that have contributed substantially to the health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications. This year’s pioneers will join an esteemed group of past award winners that includes World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, security expert Bruce Schneier, open source advocate Mozilla Foundation, and privacy rights activist Beth Givens.

The 20th Annual Pioneer Awards Ceremony keynote speaker, Evan Williams, is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creators of Blogger) and Twitter. He was born and raised on a farm in central Nebraska. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

More About the 2011 Pioneer Award Winners

Senator Ron Wyden

Few legislators have done more to promote and protect online speech, privacy rights and innovation than U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). He authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that helps make user-generated content and online services possible by protecting hosts from liability. Senator Wyden is currently the lone senator blocking passage of the PROTECT IP Act, legislation that attempts to safeguard intellectual property at the expense of free speech, technological innovation and the very foundation of the Internet. Most recently, Senator Wyden introduced legislation to create a legal framework for when and how location information derived from cell phones and other electronic devices can be accessed and used by both government agents and private entities.

Ian Goldberg

Encryption innovator Ian Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he is a founding member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group. Goldberg's research has helped expose design weaknesses in the encryption used to protect cell phone conversations and wifi networks, spurring improvements to these systems. Goldberg also co-invented the widely used Off-The-Record Messaging protocol, which makes secure instant messaging easy. Goldberg is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a winner of both the Early Researcher Award and the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award.

Nawaat.org

Created in 2004, Nawaat.org is an independent, award-winning, collective community blog operated by four Tunisian bloggers. Nawaat means "the core" in Arabic, and Nawaat.org played a crucial role in covering the social and political unrest in Tunisia last winter, which ended in the toppling of Ben Ali's regime. Nawaat disseminated day-by-day user-generated news about the uprising and helped bridge the gap between international mainstream media and citizen journalists and activists by aggregating and contextualizing information spread through social media. Nawaat has won the Reporters Without Borders Netizen Prize and the Index on Censorship Award for its work before and during the Tunisian revolution.

For more information about the Pioneer Awards, please contact events@eff.org or call EFF Donor Relationship Cordinator, Kellie Brownell, at (415) 436-9333 ext. 113.

EFF Would Like to Thank Our Sponsors, who make this event not only possible, but classy:

Past Pioneers 2010: Steven Aftergood, James Boyle, Pamela Jones and the Groklaw Website, and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru 2009: Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti, and Carl Malamud 2008: The Mozilla Foundation and its Chairman Mitchell Baker, Michael Geist, and Mark Klein 2007: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, and 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, and David Sobel 2002: Jon Johansen and Writers of DeCSS, Dan Gillmor, and Beth Givens 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, and 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, and Dave Hughes and the USENET software developers 1992: Douglas C. Engelbart, Robert Kahn, Jim Warren, Tom Jennings, and Andrzej Smereczynski

Photos from Past Pioneer Award Ceremonies Photos by Quinn Norton and Amber Wolf.