Announcing Speaker Panel & Fundraiser for Without My Consent

Earlier this month, Without My Consent (my CIS fellow project) reached its one-year anniversary. To celebrate, we're pleased to announce our first speaker panel & fundraiser scheduled for July 18! Please register, mark your calendars, and come celebrate!

In addition to turning 1, we recently obtained our official 501(c)(3) status and are now working with an army of pro bono attorneys (at 5 national law firms and 3 law schools) to build out the substantive resources available at our website. We also spoke at 2 key events this year: at the Stanford/MLRC Digital Media Conference we panelized on Social Responsibility on the Internet, and at SXSW Interactive we debated anonymity. Our work continues to be recognized by mainstream and online media like The NY Times, Forbes.com, USA Today, and CNET

WMC's mission -- to empower victims of online harassment -- is even more relevant today than when we began this project. Online harassment continues in many forms with many outcomes: from the recent coordinated and highly public harassment of feminist videographer Anita Sarkeesian, to the $0 verdict in the "Girls Gone Wild" trial, to the coming (and thankful going) of the notorious website IsAnyoneUp?, to the criminal trial and sentencing of Dharun Ravi. These examples demonstrate the varied impacts of harassment on society. Individual victims are faced with potentially extreme and irreversible reputation damage. Businesses, whose services may be used to carry out the illegal conduct, are faced with the added costs of community management, responding to legal processes, and creating policies to deal with the problem. And the public is faced with questions of how law enforcement and prosecutors should use our limited public resources to bring about justice through criminal cases. The question remains: How do we approach these problems as a community and take steps to really solve them?  

One goal of Without My Consent is to engage in debate and discussion around the issues of online harassment, accountability, the internet and free speech. With that in mind, we are excited to announce a panel discussion and fundraiser in San Francisco on July 18th. (Registration details here.) The event will include a stellar panel, moderated by SF Chronicle tech journalist James Temple, and including Christopher Sundermeier of Reputation.com, Dr. Keely Kolmes (also on WMC's Advisory Board), and others Julie Havens, manager of User Safety at Twitter, Carla Franklin, a survivor of harassment, and Melanie Griswold from the Santa Clara County DA's office, and Ralph Sivilla from the California AG's eCrimes unit. 

Please register to attend and help us get the word out! Enjoy the dynamic panel discussion and socialize with the Bay Area's tech, social justice and legal advocacy-minded attendees. (And, don't forget to make your tax-deductible donation to help us reach our campaign goal of $10,000 so we can keep doing this good work!)
 
We look forward to seeing you on July 18th!

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