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The Sisterhood Of Silicon Valley
by Bara Vaida
Two years ago, Silicon Valley Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren helped start the Women's High-Tech Coalition to create an "old-girls network" of lawmakers, staffers and women in the Washington policy community who are interested in technology issues.
Not satisfied with building the coalition within the Beltway, Lofgren earlier this year called Piper Cole, vice president for global public policy at Sun Microsystems, and persuaded her to organize and launch a West Coast version of the coalition. So far it has attracted the support of the region's three best-known female executives, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard and Meg Whitman of eBay.
Bartz has agreed to host an evening reception at her home in Atherton, Calif., on Nov. 7 for more than 100 female high-tech executives in the region who are seeking a new outlet to build connections. Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, who lives next to Bartz, is expected to attend the event to celebrate the group's launch, as are House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.
The group also has partnered with Women's Technology Cluster, a San Francisco organization that supports female-owned startups, and Girls For A Change, a Silicon Valley organization that matches girls with women to teach them leadership skills.
Other Silicon Valley women involved in the new branch of the coalition include Leslee Coleman, director of government affairs at Solectron, and Ellen Stroud, who lives in San Francisco and represents the peer-to-peer networking company StreamCast on Capitol Hill.
TechNet Change In The Works?
Connie Correll, executive vice president of the bipartisan lobbying group TechNet since March 2001, is leaving the West Coast to return to the Beltway by the end of the year, according to some high-tech industry sources. She is returning to take a job with the Bush administration and likely will work on high-tech policy issues, the sources said.
Before joining TechNet, Correll spent two years as head of communications for the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) and before that spent eight years on Capitol Hill as administrative assistant and press secretary to former Rep. Rick White, R-Wash., and former Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. White currently is TechNet's president.
TechNet and Bush administration officials declined to comment on Correll's plans.
Bush Nominates Science Team
President Bush has nominated several individuals to serve on the National Science Board, which governs the National Science Foundation (NSF). The nominees include former Texas A&M University President Ray Bowen, who left the university in Bush's home state this summer. From 1990 to 1991, Bowen was deputy assistant director for engineering at NSF and before that was dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky.
The other nominees are: California Institute of Technology physics professor Barry Barish; Purdue University President Emeritus Steven Beering; Delores Etter, a professor of electrical engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy; Kenneth Ford, director of the University of West Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition; Daniel Hastings, associate director of the engineering systems division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and NSF consultant and author Jo Anne Vasquez, who most recently was a science teacher in Arizona.
In other administration news, Greg Jenner has been appointed deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy. He had been serving as a senior adviser and acting deputy assistant secretary since July. Most recently, Jenner was a partner in the tax and legislative group at the Venable, Baetjer, Howard & Civiletti law firm and before that was tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee between 1985 and 1989.
FCC Announces Senior Staff Appointments
The FCC has named Carolyn Fleming Williams as director of the office of communications business opportunities, which is the principal advisory office on matters related to small business policy and law. Williams previously was an attorney-adviser on consumer protection and competition at the FCC's former Cable Services Bureau.
The agency also named P. June Taylor as assistant bureau chief and chief of staff for the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. She replaces Barbara Douglas, who left to become FCC's director of workplace diversity. Taylor most recently was an attorney with the general counsel's office for the Western Area Power Administration at the Energy Department.
Lobbyists On The Move
The Small Business Technology Coalition has hired Joshua Hastert to lobby for the organization, which represents emerging technology-based companies in Washington. According to filings with Congress, Hastert will lobby on promoting equal consideration for small businesses. He also was hired to lobby for Accurate Automation, a Tennessee high-tech design and manufacturing firm, to monitor legislation related to science, budget, defense and other issues. Hastert is the son of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
In other lobbying news, DigitalConsumer.Org, the grassroots organization active in the debate over consumers' "fair use" rights to copyrighted content, has hired Dutko Group partner Kim Koontz Bayliss and Vice President Stephen Sayle as lobbyists. On the West Coast, Kraus hired Wade Randlett, the former head of Democratic outreach for TechNet, as a lobbyist.
"We knew one of our keys was to have someone represent us in Washington since I didn't" have the connections there, said Joe Kraus, co-founder of the San Francisco Bay-based group and of the now-defunct ExciteAtHome.
The group has had some success this past year in adding dialogue to the debate in Congress over whether legislators should mandate technology to manage digital rights. Kraus argues that Congress should not mandate technology because doing so would stifle innovation.
Elsewhere, Covad Communications hired Clinton Robinson as director of legislative affairs last week. Robinson will be in charge of communicating the benefits of competition and consumer choice in telecommunications, and he will meet with lawmakers on high-speed Internet deployment and pricing policy in the telecom sector. Before joining Covad, Robinson was a legislative policy adviser for WorldCom, where he served as an advocate on the 1996 Telecommunications Act and other telecom issues. He also once worked for Rep. John Linder, R-Ga.
High-Speed Route To The White House?
Though Congress has not moved far in addressing broadband policy this year, the issue already has surfaced on the 2004 presidential campaign trail.
Declared presidential candidate Howard Dean, the Democratic governor of Vermont, spent last week touring Silicon Valley with Carl Guardino, head of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, as his guide. Dean and Guardino stopped by a San Jose dinner and reception of the board for the tech group AeA to meet officials.
When asked by a reporter what he would do to spur economic growth in the high-tech sector, Dean said, "Broadband. I would work on getting broadband to the nation's rural and small communities and that will help the broader economy."
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