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

Limor "Ladyada" Fried

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

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.