Jon Postel, who helped institutionalise the underpinnings of today's Internet standards,
processes and functions. And we are pleased that Jon's nephew Ben Ceverny has joined us
to accept the award on behalf of the Postel family. So please welcome Ben Ceverny.
[APPLAUSE]
Hello, thank you, this is incredibly humbling to be in this context here among so many of the people
that not only are so instrumental to the construction of a system that, you know, I'm of generation now
me and my peers are building Internet applications in Silicon Valley in the frothy Internet economy that
exists there now and it's just amazing to imagine that this group here is upstream in history from all of that,
including my cousin Jon who for a long time I think we really thought of him as Gandalf in the family,
we had very little idea what he actually did, but he was radiating this kind of a quiet,
willful integrity, which I think really was the foundation of much of what happened in his sort of
shepherding of many of these processes, and I feel like there might be at least one anecdote
to share which is... he was always really very kind of casual in his approach to the family,
he sort of explained what was happening to the family and he would always give me these
dot matrix printed gift certificates to come and play Colossal Cave when I was a kid, I would
go down to ISI, log in to the computer and play adventure games, and one year he asked me
if it felt any different to be playing the game, and I said "No", and he said well you're sitting here
in Marina Del Rey with me, but you're playing the game at Stanford. To me that was a moment
when I began to understand what this was all about, but from a kid's perspective.
The second anecdote was sitting around a table I think at Christmas time, when Jon had to
leave the room to take a phone call, and came back and said it was the telecommunications minister
of the Ukraine, who was calling to say that he would like a top level domain because the Soviet Union
was dissolving... [LAUGHTER]
This was just kind of out of the blue for people who don't really understand what Jon is doing
down at ISI all the time, to realise that he's in communication with these people,
it's what the Internet was becoming was this heartbeat of international communications
that really was beginning to help structure these types of transformations like the
Soviet Union's dissolution, so there was a real powerful sense that that was underlying
all that he was working on was a real awareness of what the effects of these tools were on people
that was another real important... why he would be so interested in the RFCs, and why he'd be so
interested in making sure that people understood what it was about, the idea of consensus
and community building, which was now, you know I was part of the design team on Flickr,
and Flickr is a community-based service for photos, but really what we had discovered,
the whole idea of Web 2.0, is that it's the social fabric that underlies the tools, that really make
the tools viable, and I think that Jon really was the shepherd of the community, we talk about
community building online as a set of users now, but the community that Jon built was the actual
community that created the Internet in the first place, which was a very powerful... the idea that
one would be able to negotiate the roiling waters of the politics and the technologies and things like
that, to cook down all of these initiatives into things that people could all consume and understand
and share with each other is a profound thing, so I'm... it was not until later in life that I was able
to understand what Jon really represented and it's such an amazing honour to have him in my
family and it's an amazing honour to represent him here with all of you.
Thank you very much.