The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the winners of this year’s Pioneer Award, given for contributions to online liberty: the Mozilla Foundation and its Chairman Mitchell Baker, University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist, and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. The awards will be given out at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, which starts on March 2.
The award ceremony will be held at 7pm, March 4th at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina in conjunction with the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Michael Robertson — founder and CEO of MP3.com, Linspire, MP3Tunes and Gizmo5 — will give the awards’ keynote address: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting…To Be Sued.”…
The winners of the 17th annual Pioneer Awards were nominated by the public and then chosen by a panel of judges. This year’s panel includes Kim Alexander (President and founder, California Voter Foundation), Esther Dyson (Internet court jester and blogger, Release 0.9; founding chairman of ICANN; former chairman of EFF), Mitch Kapor (President, Kapor Enterprises; co-founder and former chairman EFF), Drazen Pantic (Co-director, Location One), Barbara Simons (IBM Research [Retired] and former president ACM), James Tyre, (Co-founder, The Censorware Project; EFF policy fellow) and Jimmy Wales, (Founder, Wikipedia; co-founder, Wikia; chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation).