Thanks to Everyone for Attending the 2009 Pioneer Awards honoring:

Limor "Ladyada" Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman keynoted the event, and the celebration included drinks, fine food, and excellent company.

The ceremony was held in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Summit conference co-produced by O'Reilly and TechWeb, and took place at the Westin San Francisco on Thursday, October 22nd at 7 pm.

Awarded every year since 1992, the Pioneer Awards recognize leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier.

Special thanks to our sponsors: MetroPCS, eBay, Microsoft, Facebook & SaurikIT

Judging Panel

EFF would like to thank the Judging Panel for the 2009 Pioneer Awards:

Kim Alexander

President and founder, California Voter Foundation

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

IBM Research [Retired] and former president ACM

James Tyre

Co-founder, The Censorware Project; EFF policy fellow

Past Pioneers

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

2009 Honorees

Limor "Ladyada" Fried

Photo by Fumi

A pioneer in the field of open-source hardware and software hacking, Ladyada helps the general public engineer and adapt consumer electronics to better suit their needs. Her do-it-yourself ethic is founded on the idea that consumer electronics are best modified for use by customers, not corporations. Fried runs her own company, Adafruit Industries, which sells unique and fun do-it-yourself kits to help consumers make gadgets such as backup iPod chargers, green power monitors and programmable displays for bicycle wheels. She also hosts an Internet video program called "Citizen Engineer" that provides step-by-step instructions to help consumers build and alter their own home devices.

Harri Hursti

Harri Hursti discovered gaping vulnerabilities in the widely used optical scan voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems in 2005, in collaboration with the Leon County, Florida, Supervisor of Elections and elections watchdog group BBV. The "Hursti Hack", as his breakthrough became known, brought about far-reaching scrutiny of voting machine hardware and software. Research conducted in other states confirmed numerous systematic flaws and led to the decertification of thousands of faulty voting machines. Hursti is currently Chief Technical Officer of the Clear Ballot Group, a Boston company that builds tools to rigorously and transparently verify election results.

Carl Malamud

Photo by Joi

Technologist, author, and public domain advocate, Carl Malamud is currently known for his foundation, public.resource.org. As founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, Malamud was responsible for creating the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition. Malamud is the author of eight books, including "Exploring the Internet" and "A World's Fair." He was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and is the former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium.

Keynote speaker: Reid Hoffman

Pioneer Awards keynoter Reid Hoffman is Executive Chairman and a co-founder of LinkedIn. Previously, Hoffman was Executive Vice President of PayPal and has also held management roles at Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. Hoffman serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart, Kiva.org, and the Mozilla Corporation.