 we are going to be a a a good evening everyone, and welcome to the 17th annual IP three awards. My name is Virginia mom Abrams and I have the privilege of serving as board chair for public knowledge. As you all know, this has been a completely and totally normal year for everyone. Clearly, I'm kidding. As we gather together for yet another virtual event, I hope that you'll take away from this evening why the work of public knowledge is more important than ever. Never before has the work of the public interest community been so important and public knowledge in particular with its ongoing mission to promote freedom of expression and open Internet and technology. Innovation plays a critical role in shaping public policy in a way that deeply matters. Tonight is a celebration of public knowledge, but it's also a celebration of people who have been relentless in their advocacy for their communities and for consumers. People like Lila Bailey, Matthew Rantinen and Jeffrey Blackwell and campaigns like Stop Hate for Profit all embody the principles of fighting and advocating in the public interest. In the public interest, those four words can feel so foreign in these times, but let us not forget that those four words are our North Star. And in the public interest is a concept that we as a community of advocates can never let wither and die. Tonight is a celebration, but it's also a call to action to continue to fight advocate and give voice to policies that put the public interest first. This evening I also like to recognize the wonderful PK board members that have joined us and thank you for your continued support. Maura Corbett, PK's past chairwoman and whose shoes I can only hope to fill, Michael Petrucone, Brewster Kale, Commissioner Michael Cops, Kevin Warbach, Laurent Crenshaw, Andrew McLaughlin, Frank Torres, Moses Boyd and our newest board members, Mikhail Rosen and Daphne Keller. Thank you all for your dedication, your energy and your engagement. Before we move forward with the program, I'd like to take a moment of silence tonight to honor and acknowledge the 200,000 Americans we lost this year to COVID-19, our friends, our family members and our neighbors. May their memories be a blessing to us all. I'd also like to honor the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. May her memory be a blessing to the world and to all who have benefited from her life's work and advocacy. Thank you. It is now my distinct pleasure to introduce public knowledge's fearless leader, Chris Lewis. Chris, it's all yours. Thank you, Virginia. Thank you so much. Virginia, we're so grateful to have you as our new board chair this year. And thank you to all our wonderful board members who are joining us, especially the fantastic Maura Corbett who served as our chair for so long and through our leadership transition last year. You traded up. Well, we're glad you're still with us, Maura. Thank you. It's good to see everyone. It's also great that even in this virtual room, we can still benefit from the fantastic Bob Schwartz quartet. Thanks to Bob and the quartet for loaning us their music once again. Bob's been doubling as a policy ally and then later for the IP3 awards for as long as I've been here and it wouldn't be the same without you, Bob. Welcome to everyone. Thank you for joining us for the 17th annual IP3 awards. Every year this is an event where we get all of our friends and colleagues together. We've got, I know some folks here from our major foundations who support us and they're represented here. It's great to see you all. I even see some of our fantastic friends from industry. We love you guys. It's great to have you all here together in one room, one virtual room in the spirit of celebrating those who have made contributions to tech and communications policy. The IP3 awards is always a fun and relaxing get together in recent years and I always look forward to the reception and the conversation. We have the coolest mix I think of public interest allies and industry folks and dedicated government officials sharing a drink networking who knows maybe even finding some new paths forward on policy. But we know it's not the same this year. We're just glad you guys could join us. And we hope you'll enjoy the next 90 minutes or so that we planned, even though I know many of you have been on Zoom calls all day long. We appreciate that you took the time out to join us. While you're here in the main room, we do ask that you keep your sound muted through the program. It'll be a bit more free flowing I think in the breakout rooms. Also please take the time as you guys are doing use the chat feature to comment and share and connect with folks throughout the event. And hopefully it'll be as fun and interactive as possible. And just remember that what you say publicly in the chat can be read by everyone so just keep it fun and keep it clean. Gigi son if you're out there I'm thinking of you keep it clean Gigi. Okay. Thank you for the disclosure we are recording this event for prosperity. And we hope to be able to put it up on our YouTube page in the future. Hopefully everyone signed up early enough and received our gift pack before the event. If you did you no doubt have your PK flute, ready to go for the toast at the end of the night, and are keeping safe with our PK branded face mask and door opener tool, which I know some folks may not have seen before but I know you'll figure it out. And if not, I hope you have a tasty beverage to keep you going through the 90 minutes. As I said we have a great mix of industry and public interest friends here tonight. And there are some great sponsors who have made this event possible and I want to personally acknowledge them for their support. First we have our fantastic platinum sponsors, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Dish, DuckDuckGo, Legato, Netflix, Newscore, and our friends at SiriusXM and Pandora together. So thank you to our platinum sponsors. Also we want to acknowledge our gold level sponsors as well. Bloomberg, the Internet Society, T-Mobile, Twitter, Verizon, Winstream, and our friends at the Writers Guild of America West. Thank you gold sponsors. And a lot of you are sponsors maybe at the silver level or the bronze level or our friends level. We can't thank you all enough for pitching in and doing what you can to help PK work and you can see the names on the slides here. Your partnership, especially you know folks in industry, your partnership makes our analysis at PK smarter. I say that all the time and and even when we may challenge you on certain issues we appreciate and we know we challenge you sometimes. We're grateful that you see value in the mission driven work of our amazing team and that you value the public interest communities place at the table in policymaking. This year and these challenging times we're doubly grateful that when we said we would be holding these awards virtually to the pandemic. So many of you said that you would be here to support regardless. So thank you, thank you, thank you to all of our sponsors. Also want to take a moment to talk a bit about 2020 and and our work of public knowledge and 2020 can be a heavy topic, but but I think it's important that we talk about how our work fits in with what's going on right now you know 2020 has been a challenging year for all of us as Virginia said, and our country has been wrestling with a triple triple whammy of challenges from the coronavirus pandemic to the subsequent economic recession. And of course the ongoing challenge of overcoming the legacy of white supremacy and racism in America that has sparked so many protests. Sometimes it can be hard to focus on tech issues with so many fundamental challenges every day, but then we turn around and we see just how much technology is a part of our lives. How much of an impact tech innovation has on giving everyday people new job opportunities new tools for essentials like education and healthcare, or new ways to freely tell their own stories. And of course the diverse American stories and experiences for those of you like me who cannot avoid living the challenge of grace. Every day, we've walked and I've watched with curiosity at folks who might be called newly woke this year. The protests in 2020 were filled with the newly woke and it was personally refreshing to see so many folks who do not look like me, show that they care about the inequities that black people and other people of color are facing in our country, and to be moved to do something about it. That may be just a few more people see this for what it is that it's not a game that it's about our lives, and I think that is something to build on. I believe that tech and media policy, the work of public knowledge and our allies is at a similar place right now. This full integration of technology in our lives has been real for many years, but it feels like this year suddenly the nerds like us have been joined by a wave of newly woke voices who realize that policymakers have not done enough to protect the needs of the public online and in the media. I'll give you a few examples. The needs of Americans have been left out from access to high speed broadband for years. And yet suddenly, when it's essential nature is personified in that child who is your, your, your class, your child's classmate sitting at home without access to online schooling. Suddenly people have woken up to the digital divide digital platforms they've collected our data for years, but now more and more people are waking up to the need for comprehensive privacy legislation. Fires, wildfires, hurricanes, other natural disasters have been wiping out communications networks for years. But when it's on the news every day and we're all home every day and you can't escape it, there are newly woke Americans ready to understand that we all need reliable standards and with responses to keep people connected to essential communications. And finally internet users have shared misinformation and dated debated facts for years. But now sadly, when we see news conglomerates and political actors combined to use the virality of digital platforms to so fear and distrust in our basic institutions of government and society, people are waking up. They're waking up to find that our core institutions and our values are under threat. Just like racism, this is not a game. This is about, this is not about who's up or down in Washington. This is about people's lives and whether or not technology and media will contribute to making us a more equitable and perfect union, or if it will be used to divide people and create greater inequity. So my friends, folks in this virtual room and at this event. What are we going to do, what are we going to do now that more of the country is woke when it comes to the public interest needs of tech and media today. Well, I want to challenge you to do one thing. I want to challenge you to invest in the growing voice of the public and the public interest community from new perspectives. So if you're our friends from industry and we love you, believe me at some point you're going to be worried about another company competing with you or acting as a gatekeeper. And it's the values of the public interest that can rise above the cynical view of two companies battling in Washington for what just looks like more money and more revenue. If you are friends who are here from working government, or you work in a public interest group, I hope you'll look at communities that that you don't have constituents in. You may be blue and urban and they may be red and rural, but the people and the families you will find there want the same things that you do. They want the ability to speak their own truth and tell their own stories. They want affordable access to open and secure communications tools that permit them to speak. These are the tools and policies that build trust in the systems and institutions of our society. These values are public interest values, no matter where you live or what service you use. And this phase we're in with the newly woke, hopefully showing policymakers that our longstanding issues never went away, and that we have new challenges that are upon us. They're critical to our lives and we must continue to solve them boldly or risk greater distrust and division in our society. So I believe we can do it. Again, 2020 can be heavy and this may sound heavy, but I have hope that because all of you are here that you believe you can do your part and be a part of it too. At public knowledge, we wake up every day ready to work with each of you to fight for these values together, and I challenge you to do the same. And with that, we want to get into our program tonight. Since we're meeting virtually this year, we've changed up the program a bit, trying to liven things up. Hopefully you're not staring at the screen the whole time, but you can interact in a minute I'm going to be introducing our special guest speaker, and then following the awards presentations. We will have breakout room conversations with our award winners, led by our fabulous public knowledge team. Hopefully everyone followed the directions that we've been emailing all week about how to join the event and sign in with a with a zoom account and this should make the technical transitions to the breakout rooms run smoothly. But if there are any issues, our team will be here to help you. And finally, when we return from the breakout rooms, we don't want you to leave don't sign up. Okay, because we will wrap up the program with a special raffle giveaway is more like a giveaway than a raffle and a virtual toast, and you need to be here and be present to win one of these prizes. Okay, so is everyone ready to move through our program.