E2A
San Francisco
Oct 26 and 27, 1996

Avatar CyberSpace Constitution Talks
Your rights in digital space!

A Constitution for Avatar Cyberspace
Rights, Reason, and Responsibility in Social Computing

The purpose of this panel & town-meeting BOF session is to set an agenda for the development of a proposed constitution and a bill-of-rights & responsibilities for shared online environments. The technical concerns of making the Net safe for avatars is only part of the challenge we face in building a networked, digital world. To create worlds which both reflect and facilitate the needs of real human beings, questions of property rights, personal freedoms, standards of behavior and enforcement must be addressed. Your input is needed to help identify the issues, and to reach concensus, to help guide the builders of online worlds.

Moderator:
Robert Gelman, President BG & Associates

Panelists:
Lori Fena, Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Stephanie Lamarre, attorney, McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen
Dan Greening, President, Chaco Communications
(others TBA)

Biographies:

Robert Gelman
President, BG & Associates


Robert Gelman is President of BG & Associates, producers and managers of online ventures for both the WWW and America Online. His company specializes in text and interactive audio content as well as live-event productions. As an industry observer, he is a contributing editor to InterActivity Magazine and CyberEdge Journal where his writing often focuses on cyber-liberties and the impact of technology on contemporary culture.

Lori Fena
Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation


Lori Fena was appointed Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in September of 1995, a critical time in the evolution of the Internet and online world. Although the issues are only now gaining widespread awareness, the organization was started in 1990, to defend individual rights and promote responsibility in the new electronic world. Today, the Foundation is leading the charge to ensure that the balance of individual rights and social responsibility is respected by individuals, corporations and governing authorities alike.

EFF brought Ms. Fena in to execute a major shift in the overall structure of the organization. She is responsible for focusing the organization on three primary tasks: to influence legislation and participate in court proceedings with implications for the online world; to work with the industry to encourage the protection of civil liberties and to promote ethics online; and to educate the public on these issues. The first order of business was moving EFF to Silicon Valley from Washington, DC, to build a stronger base of support and place emphasis on the industry and public education goals.

Stephanie S. Lamarre
McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enerse


Stephanie S. Lamarre practices in the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Group (at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen), emphasizing technology licensing, multimedia development, copyright and trademark counseling, and communications law. She represents high technology companies as well as traditional publishers, content providers, and cable television companies. Most recently, her work has focused on Internet-related deals, such as licensing web search engine software.

Stephanie has represented a software publisher in a large seizure of infringing software and ensuing copyright and trademark litigation. She has represented a video game producer and a publisher of model codes in copyright infringement litigation. She also assists a cable company in franchise negotiations with local governments.

Dan Greening
Co-founder, Chaco Communications


Dan Greening calls himself a corporate diplomat, manager, software architect, and researcher in computer software and hardware: multimedia, networking, graphical-user interfaces, parallel processing, operating systems, networking, hardware architecture, VLSI CAD, combinatorial optimization, and statistics. He is also a writer on both industrial and academic topics.

In 1994, he co-founded a Chaco Communications to produce multimedia network games and collaboration software. Chaco now offers both client and server software tools for Internet-based immersive real-time virtual communities. Dan'sperspective in this field is unique and valuable for its mix of computer-science and social endeavors.




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