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CPSR Annual Weekend

I'm on the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and attended our annual weekend a month ago in Palo Alto. (I promise I'll start getting these things up sooner, someday.) I wrote up a summary for our member newsletter, The CPSR Compiler. Here is my article:

CPSR hosted it's annual weekend at the end of October. As you know, we dispensed with the standard content conference, and instead held a series of meetings with different groups to help us determine strategies for moving CPSR forward. While no magic solutions were discovered, we learned a lot about who we are and where we need to go.

First, the Board of Directors spent a half day with a leadership development consultant, Ann Danner, fulfilling one of the deliverables of our Ford Foundation grant. During this session, we learned quite a bit about ourselves and how a board in our kind of organization should concentrate its efforts. Then the Board met for a day to discuss the outcomes of that meeting, to review our budgets and audit, and to talk more about the Strategic Plan process. One significant outcome of this meeting was a commitment to re-energize board committees, to hopefully reduce the workload of the board as a whole.

On Saturday October 29, we spent the morning with the Board Advisory Council. As you may know, the formulation of this Advisory Council fulfills another of the Ford deliverables, as does the creation of a Strategic Plan for the organization. Thus, the principal authors of the Plan sit on the Advisory Council, and the primary reviewers are the Council members and the Board. We discussed the Plan and a schedule for completing its editing and delivery, including allowing more time for member feedback. Then we adjourned to a larger meeting room for main event of the day, our annual member meeting.

The member meeting was well attended by local and several national activists, and we discussed the Strategic Plan, and more generally, the future of CPSR. We spent the bulk of the time discussing how we organize our activism, and how we pick program areas to focus on? While we need to support the current processes that allow initiatives to bubble up from the grassroots, some of our members and certainly the funding community and the public need to see a little more centralized thinking and planning regarding the program areas that CPSR pursues. We could certainly do a better job of synthesizing and communicating the various initiatives of members, to help find common interests and to build the strongest areas into organizational foci. However, we saw a need (and an opportunity) to do a better job of articulating what our most important work was, to even define one or a couple primary focus areas -- programs that capture the attention of members and of the funding community, and make it easier to tell people through concrete examples what CPSR stands for and works on.

The areas that attracted the most attention are these:

1) Electronic Voting - this has seen our most successful work in the US over the last year or two, although it doesn't necessarily apply to only the US; we see some good funding opportunities to be had over the next US election cycles, and if the program grows, there may be opportunities to expand internationally.

2) Technologies of surveillance and control - framing the leading privacy and civil liberties questions in a way that makes it clear what the unique contribution CPSR can bring, by examining the particular technologies and throwing into question the way that they are represented and used.

3) Internet Governance - this has been the most visible recent international program area, particularly surrounding the WSIS meeting; other international issues we currently work on fit well into (2) above, which is really the best area to bridge US and International activism.

As usual, program issues provided the most lively and interesting discussions with our membership, which makes it clear that defining and articulating and communicating widely our program remains the key to energizing the organization and keeping it viable into the future.

NORBERT WIENER AWARD

Finally, on Saturday night, we hosted a reception to present the Norbert Wiener Award to Douglas Englebart. It was a lively event that attracted many members as well as fans of Englebart, and generated numerous interesting discussions. See our web site for photos, and read more about the award and its recipient.    Link: http://www.cpsr.org/act/events/annconf/05annmeet

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