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The CPSR Compiler - April 2004

COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS for SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Turning Thoughts to Actions

REPORT FROM THE BOARD

In light of the importance of and strong interest in this year's U.S. presidential election, the 2004 annual conference and meeting will take place in or around Washington, DC. The board aims to combine some of the traditional issue-oriented content with extensive discussion of CPSR's future. Substantial time and attention will be devoted to how to better engage members, support programmatic activity, increase membership and impact, and generally revitalize CPSR. Volunteers are needed to help organize this event. Please contact Paul Hyland, phyland(a)cpsr.org, if you are willing and able to be involved.

Also as noted in the last Compiler, an inevitable consequence of our decline in membership and a weak U.S. economy has been a drop in income. In order to ensure that CPSR remains financially viable going into the next fiscal year, the board has reluctantly decided to reduce our Managing Director, Susan Evoy, to 3/4 time for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends on June 30. The board also intends to negotiate for a lower rent for the existing CPSR office space, the lease for which expires at the end of the fiscal year.

As part of the larger effort to expand CPSR's membership base, the board would like to develop a small display ad suitable for placement in relevant professional and trade publications. This would occur after the new Web site is operational so as to drive traffic to the new site. We are in the process of identifying target publications. Meanwhile, we are looking for a member with graphic design experience who would be willing to donate some time to assist with development of the ad. To suggest possible target publications or to volunteer to help design the ad, please contact Stuart Shapiro, sshapiro(a)cpsr.org.

On April 15, 2004, Stuart Shapiro was elected by the board to be Vice President of CPSR for a term to end on 30 June, 2004

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Office Closed April 27-May 10

CPSR will be haphazardly staffed from April 27 - May 10th, while Susan is out. If you need assistance while Susan is away, help MAY be available by :

Email: cpsr(a)cpsr.org

Phone: 650-322-3778 Email an appropriate CPSR list (see http://lists.cpsr.org), as in "vote-wg" - the email list with CPSR's voting technology experts; and/or Email cpsr-activists(a)lists.cpsr.org, to solicit help from fellow members with a wide variety of expertise.

Help is usually just an email away.

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CPSR BOARD ELECTIONS

Due to circumstances beyond our control, board election materials will be mailed to members slightly later (probably 1-2 days) than the April 28 date originally announced. We apologize for the delay.

Candidate statements will be posted to http://www.cpsr.org by April 28th.

Members can have access to the candidates, and current and continuing board members, to discuss and debate issues by joining the Elections list via http://lists.cpsr.org/elections

Recent CPSR elections have been decided by a handful of votes. Your vote really can make a difference. Participating in the annual board election represents one of the most fundamental ways in which you can engage and influence your organization.

Your ballot must be postmarked back to CPSR by June 7.

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MAY 1ST DEADLINE FOR 2003-04 STUDENT ESSAY CONTEST

http://www.cpsr.org/essays/2004/contest.html

Students can be published and win awards in Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility's Essay Contest.

CPSR seeks papers that will advance its work within its Working Groups and interests.

Participating students and faculty may join or renew their memberships in CPSR for one year for $15 and $25, respectively.

The Essay Contest guidelines are at http://www.cpsr.org/essays/2004/contest.html

Past Winning Essays are at

http://www.cpsr.org/essays/2003/index.html

http://www.cpsr.org/essays/2002/index.html

http://www.cpsr.org/essays/2001/index.html

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BARCELONA MEETING - MAY 15

Possible thematic focus: Main developments in ICT policy environment---Catalonia & Spanish, Europe, Global--- and CPSR's possible responses.

Major trends and issues in Catalonia and Spain, in Europe generally, and at the global level (WSIS, Internet governance, WIPO, security, etc), and maybe an organizing/activist session

Check http://www.spain.cpsr.org/ for a web page for the event in a few days.

Spread the word. Now it's easier for Spanish speakers to join CPSR, with our translated secure online membership form at https://secure.privaterra.org/cpsr/join-es.html

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CPSR'S VOTING TECHNOLOGY WORKING GROUP REPORT

Erik Nilsson represented CPSR and CPSR's Voting Technology Working Group (vote-wg) at an invitation-only conference in Chicago on touch-screen/DRE voting issues. Many prominent figures on this issue were there, as well as Civil Rights/Democracy organizations, and others. There was another CPSR member present: Barbara Simons, primarily representing ACM.

The weekend was tiring, but went pretty well. Progress was made on the DRE issue, and CPSR is looked to for leadership on some issues, in part because of our long history on electronic elections issues.

Regarding Defending America's Vote (DAV, the vote-wg project proposal Erik sent out April 9th), CPSR will pursue DAV, in cooperation with some of the organizations present.

Erik said, "Several people came up to me and told me how glad they were that CPSR was there, and how glad they were to have the benefit of our expertise. It was a long, hot weekend, but worth it."

This is going to be an exciting, high-profile project. This should be the most interesting and high-profile work vote-wg's been involved in at least since CPSR sent people to South Africa for the historic 1994 elections. This is a great opportunity to work on an important issue with a GREAT group of collaborators and see results from your work in a very short time. Erik already has some commitments of time and resources to make this happen. We are going to do cool, important stuff! If you are even slightly interested in working on the project, email Erik (erikn(a)cpsr.org) soon. We have to move quickly to get our part of the work organized.

CPSR members can join in by subscribing via http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/vote-wg

On March 25, Paul Hyland participated in a panel on Digital Democracy at the Internet Commons Congress in Rockville, MD. Paul covered the history of CPSR's involvement in election technology, recent developments concerning HAVA and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting devices, and problems with their implementation that have already been documented. He also discussed current legislative proposals in the House and Senate to require a voter verifiable paper ballot (VVPB) - Holt Bill (H.R. 2239) and Graham Bill (S. 1980) - and encouraged people to support these pieces of legislation a the federal level, in addition to supporting efforts at the state and local level to require VVPBs. Finally, Paul discussed ways that voters can request or use paper ballots instead of using DREs (including voting by absentee ballot and finding out how to request paper alternatives on election day), and mentioned various open source election software projects that are gaining steam.

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ARTFUL INTEGRATION: INTERWEAVING MEDIA, MATERIALS AND PRACTICES

PDC 2004

July 27-31

Toronto, Ontario, CANADA

CPSR will be hosting its eighth Participatory Design Conference.

Participatory Design (PD) is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of PD is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of the (mainly computerized) systems they use.

Although the deadline for research papers has passed (the program committee is now feverishly reviewing them), there are other opportunities for participating in this exciting conference.

There are two upcoming deadline dates of interest:

May 1 - Art Installations, Environments, Projects, Designs, Demonstrations submissions
May 7 - short papers, conference workshop submissions

The Participatory Design Conferences, held every two years since 1990, have brought together a multidisciplinary and international group of software developers, researchers, social scientists, designers, activists, practitioners, users, citizens, cultural workers and managers who adopt distinctively participatory approaches in the development of information and communication artifacts, systems, services and technologies.

Whether or not, you submit anything we hope to see you in Toronto this summer! You'll enjoy yourself and learn a lot too.

Fiorella de Cindio and Doug Schuler (program committee co-chairs)

Stay tuned for more information... See http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/pdc2004

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PUBLIC SPHERE PROJECT REPORT

by Doug Schuler

Lots of Public Sphere Project activities to report. The most ambitious achievement was probably submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation. The basic plan is to convene a focused interdisciplinary "civic intelligence" workshop with 40 activists and researchers. The next step will be to organize the next Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC) Symposium on the same topic. In late March I gave a keynote address on "Community Networking and Civic Intelligence" at the Community Networking Analysis conference in Brighton, England. This resulted in an invitation to guest edit a special issue of "AI & Society" on civic intelligence. (Please note that "civic intelligence" is NOT particularly related to artificial intelligence except that computers are likely to play a role in either.) The presentation can be found at http://www.scn.org/commnet/Presentations/cna/cna2004.html . In the meantime, the pattern language for democratic information and communication system now has over 250 pattern submissions. We now have an intern working halftime on developing the pattern language. Nearly 20 "editors" have volunteered and a book proposal is nearly complete. Google has now upgraded our pattern language project to fourth place (out of "about 52,600"). Finally, I have been asked to be a GLOCOM Fellow. GLOCOM is the Center for Global Communications which is associated with the International University of Japan.

CPSR signed a letter to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on biometric travel documents.

See http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/terrorism/rpt/icaoletter.pdf

Background Info:

http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/terrorism/rpt/icaobackground.html

and Press Release

http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/terrorism/rpt/icaopressrelease.html

On March 17, Paul Hyland debated Susan Meisinger, President of the Society for Human Resource Management, on Fox Morning News in Washington, DC. They were discussing a new service of Yahoo! HotJobs to sell consumers their ChoicePoint reports in order to know what potential employers can find out about them, and to use positive reports as a selling point(!).

Paul pointed out that while there may be problems with the extent and the ability to correct ChoicePoint data in the first place, making this information available over the Internet adds security problems -- potentially making a huge amount of personal information available to anyone who is able to collect a few common data points, a boon to stalkers, identity theives, or others who seek to misuse the personal information of others.

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Privacy Concerns Dog Google's E-Mail Plans

Privaterra signed onto a letter about Google's plan to offer a free Web e-mail system with nearly unlimited storage. Robert Guerra is quoted as saying "The public should know the implications." "Google should be much more open and reach out to the community and tell them their policies." See http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=27113

As part of Robert Guerra's participation in CFP 2004, he screened "Hactivista" on April 22nd.

"Hacktivista" is the story of three University of Toronto students who travel with their professor to Guatemala and Chiapas to work with human rights organizations and activists on Internet security and connectivity. The students call themselves "hacktivists" -- a new breed of social activists who use technology to fight for privacy and freedom of speech. See http://www.citizenlab.org/hacktivista/ for more info.

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