Carl Malamud

In this WWW2010 Keynote, Carl Malamud will relate the story of his encounters with 7 bureaucratic institutions in his quest to convince government that if law is code, then it must be open source. Starting with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the days before the Web and moving on to today’s Law.Gov movement, Carl will present his case that materials, be they technical standards or court opinions, must be available to all.

Carl Malamud is founder and director of Public.Resource.Org a nonprofit corporation that has placed over 90 million pages of U.S. government documents on the Internet, including a large number of judicial opinions, public safety codes, and other materials that were never publicly available before. Public.Resource.Org has also been responsible for removing information that contains Social Security numbers and other protected private information from the Internet, and running a series of audits that have resulted changes in both the U.S. Congress and the federal judiciary. Public.Resource.Org also runs FedFlix, a program that digitizes government videotapes and then puts them on-line as a public domain stock footage library.

Previous to running Public.Resource.Org, Carl was the Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress, and the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, which ran the first radio station on the Internet, put the U.S. SEC and Patent databases on-line, and created the Internet 1996 World Exposition. He is the author of 8 professional reference books and has done stints as a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and Keio University. He received the Berkman Award from Harvard University and the EFF Pioneer Award.

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