Karin Spaink
In the middle of 1995, I got involved with civil rights issues on the net on a rather personal level: Scientology raided my provider, XS4all, over a homepage that one of their other customers had put on-line. That raid brought about a whole cascade of questions: are homepages the responsibility of their makers, or of those through which systems they are served? Are internet providers to be regarded as publishers, or as common carriers? Is a complaint enough on the net to make a provider pull a page? How does censorship on the net work?
Through these questions, I became involved in freedom of speech issues. Meanwhile, I have learned a lot about the net, won all court cases against Scientology, I write and lecture about the net quite regularly, and have become involved in various organisations that strive to put the net to a political and educational use, to educate people and politicians about the net, to inform patients, and to define and defend civil rights on the net.
From 2002 to mid 2005, I was an external advisor for the Freedom of the Media bureau of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the OSCE) on the subject of internet and freedom of the media. In that capacity, I have written several articles and did various presentations for them, and have assisted in organising their expert conferences on Freedom of the media and the Internet, the second of which was held in August 2004. The first conference issued the Amsterdam Recommendations (June 2003). The third and final conference was held in Amsterdam in 2005.
In April 2005, I became editor in chief of The Next Ten Years, a series of books dealing with developments and uses of the internet after its first booming decade. The first book (published in September 2005), was about electronic patient records. I received the Dutch ISOC award for it.
In May 2005, I embarked on another big project: researching and writing the history of Hack-Tic and XS4ALL. The book will cover the years between 1989, when Hack-Tic was started, and circa 2005. It is scheduled to appear in 2010.