Weblogsky: EFF and EFF-Austin (for EFF's blogathon)

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EFF and EFF-Austin (for EFF's blogathon)

For EFF's blogathon. I first heard about the Electronic Frontier Foundation as it was forming. There was talk about it on the WELL, and I ran into "Johnny Mnemonic" on an Austin BBS, and he told me he was moving to Boston to work with this new nonprofit that was going to focus on civil liberties in cyberspace. Johnny Mnemonic was Mike Godwin, and the nonprofit was EFF.

When Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service soon after EFF was formed, and a very pissed off Steve decided to sue the bastards, EFF adopted the case as a first bit of rocket fuel for a prolonged flight. At the time EFF saw its potential as a community-based organization with chapters around the US and (eventually) the world. Steve got right on it, calling a picnic/meeting to call for the formation of EFF-Austin as a model for other chapters to follow. Along with Steve, John Quarterman, Bruce Sterling, Ed Cavazos and others, I helped organize EFF-Austin, which became the nexus of Austin's hyperactive Internet community through the 1990s. Our public meetings and events were where you would go if you were based in Austin physpace and living any part of your life on the electronic frontier.

In 1991 we joined with several other potential EFF chapters around the country on an email list called "thesegroups," and discussed (sometimes flamed) about the prospect and design of an EFF with chapters. Representatives from all the groups met in Atlanta in a very cold January 1992 to hammer out a conclusive model so that chapters could form and get to work. The board and staff of a recently
reorganized
EFF arrived from a retreat where they had decided that EFF would move from Boston to Washington DC. In the retreat they decided on a model that would not include chapters. The rest of the meeting was about how we might work effectively with EFF, but as independent groups.

We were all a bit crushed, but Jerry Berman, EFF's Director at the time, mentioned how it didn't make sense to them, given their commitment to decentralized networks, to form an organization that was centralized and that was working through chapters over which the central organization had ultimate authority. It made far more sense to have the chapters become independent organizations that could network effectively. I extended this thinking in an unpublished 1997 book, Virtual Bonfire, which included a chapter on "Nodal Politics" that was published online in 2000 by the webzine Mindjack. More people are thinking this way today; Mitch Ratcliffe and I recently co-edited Extreme Democracy, a collection of papers written as the concept of network-based advocacy and democracy began to have an national impact - during the 2004 election season.

EFF-Austin had already incorporated as a Texas nonprofit and had been active as a standalone before the Atlanta meeting was held. Despite a long dormant period (around 1997-2000), the organization is still active today, most recently actively opposing a legislative prohibition on municipal wireless projects as part of a larger coaltion. (I've been President of EFF-Austin since we revived the organization in 2001.)

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15