EFF Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards

15th Annual Ceremony Highlights Innovations in Information Technology

Washington, DC - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will honor craigslist and its leaders, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster; Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge; and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at its 15th annual Pioneer Awards ceremony. The presentation is at 7pm on Wednesday, May 3 at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference (CFP)….

…. “I’m thrilled to honor this year’s Pioneer Award recipients,” said EFF’s Executive Director, Shari Steele. “The Internet is a web of communities, among other things, and Craig, Jim, Gigi and Jimmy have all been instrumental in helping to give people the tools they need for sharing information online.”

The judges for this year’s awards were Kim Alexander (President and Founder, California Voter Foundation), Esther Dyson (editor, Release 1.0, CNET Networks), Edward W. Felten (Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Princeton University), Mitch Kapor (Chair, Open Source Applications Foundation), Drazen Pantic (Co-Director, Location One, New York), Barbara Simons (IBM Research [Retired]and former President ACM), and James Tyre (Founder, The Censorware Project).

(You can read the whole press release here. I ran the Pioneer Awards for EFF for about six or seven years during the 1990s, and I still get a kick out of seeing who they pick and attending the awards ceremonies. I’ll be at CFP myself this year, conducting a tutorial on constitutional law in cyberspace and participating in a panel concerning Google Book Search.)