This is the most incredible accolade I’ve ever received: I have been honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, which “recognizes individuals and organizations that have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.” I join the ranks of previous winners, including Tim Berners-Lee, Mitch Kapor, Jimmy Wales, Bruce Sterling, and Linus Torvalds. My fellow winners this year are Yochai Benkler and Bruce Schneier. Talk about exalted company! The awards will be given out at a ceremony chaired by Marc Cuban, at the Emerging Tech conference in San Diego later this month. I’m incredibly thankful to EFF for this honor.

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My latest InfoWeek column is online, “The Web Can Humiliate Dumb Companies. Can It Make Them Smarter?”

Dysfunctional consumer companies know only two modes of customer service: Abusive contempt, or slobbering, cringing remorse. Cory Doctorow describes how broken companies can make good customer service the standard.

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This summer marks the first year that the venerable Clarion Writers’ Workshop will run at the University of California at San Diego. Previously, the legendary science fiction writers’ boot-camp was hosted at Michigan State, where I attended it in 1992 and taught in 2005.

I’m returning as an instructor this year, along with a truly superb line-up of teachers: Greg Frost, Jeff VanderMeer (he was one of my Clarion 1992 classmates!), Karen Joy Fowler, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Each instructor teaches for a week (the last pair of instructors co-teach for two weeks). Every day, the small group of students (generally fewer than 20) critique each others’ manuscripts, with the instructor pitching in. The instructors give lectures and meet one-on-one with students, sometimes throwing in assignments. They’re available to chat with about the writing life, the business of writing, the creative process and so on — it’s an incredible opportunity for writers at the beginning of their careers to glean a wide range of industry contacts and perspective on what it means to be a professional science fiction writer.

Mostly, this is about the writing, though. Writing stories. Most students write a story every week of the workshop, and you will usually critique 3-5 stories on any given day. This is a lot of work — it’s not for the faint of heart. Clarion challenges its students to go beyond their limits and accomplish more than they ever knew they could. Writing that much, critiquing that much — you end up living and breathing the craft, thinking of nothing else for weeks on end. It changes you.

I’m the writer I am today because of my Clarion experiences. There isn’t a day that’s gone by in the past 15 years that I haven’t thought of some bit of wisdom I gleaned during my six weeks. It’s an honor to teach there, and to serve on the board of The Clarion Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Clarion.

I’m not the only one. Clarion’s roster of alumni include Bruce Sterling, Kelly Link, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Lucius Sheppard, Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tim Pratt and Gordon Van Gelder.

The application deadline is April 1, 2007 — you’ll need two complete short stories between 2,500 and 6,000 words, the willingness to give up six weeks of your life to writing, and the tuition money. I hope to see you there.

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See also: Kate Wilhelm’s must-read writerly advice/history of Clarion

Today’s Vancouver Sun has a nice article on me on the front page of the Business section.

Webtoonist Neil Gorman has bessed me with a new toon in my honor — and it’s a good ‘un!