JEFFREY BATES

The article Slashdot Enters the Political Arena said

Slashdot, the hugely important technical news and discussion site, announced the launch of politics.slashdot.org, a new section "dedicated to providing alternative political news to its technically inclined audience".

Taglined "Politics for Nerds. Your Vote Matters", the new section gives Slashdot's estimated audience of 4 million access to political news and commentary that it might not see otherwise...

Jeff Bates, vice president of editorial operations and executive editor, Slashdot.org, says that the main motivator is making his technical audience aware of important issues that affect them. "The purpose [of the site] is to inform and make people aware." Bates also makes the point that the technical community can no longer be blissfully aware of public policy issues. "With the amount of technology in our lives we can not be uninvolved", he said. "The ground rules have changed, we have to change with the ground rules."

'With the advent of the DMCA and the Induce act, the technical community can no longer be uninvolved.' Bates continued, "Part of the reasons that the DMCA was passed is that people were not involved."

Jeffrey Bates is cofounder of the popular Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters, Vice President of Editorial Operations at OSTG, and Executive Editor of Slashdot. He is also cofounder of Everything2 which is a large collaborative Internet community that has grown from being a very simple user-written encyclopedia to an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor.

Jeff "Hemos" Bates brings many years of strategic management and editorial leadership to OSTG. As Vice President of Editorial Operations and Executive Editor of Slashdot, he is responsible for setting strategy and integration for the company's business development partnerships, for driving new site and product development, and, for fun, helps manage strategic story editing and placement for the leading proprietary news site, Slashdot. While at Slashdot, he has been responsible for several industry awards including a Webby People's Voice Award for Best Community Site and Best News Site, as well as Yahoo!'s "Top 100" Best of the Internet Award. Slashdot has also been cited by The Washington Post, Brill's Content, TIME, USA Today, Rolling Stone and other industry leading publications as one of the most innovative and important sites for the technical community.

Jeff has spoken at numerous industry leading conferences and events including MIT, LinuxWorld, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, Northern Michigan University and Sun Developers Group, the Asian Open Source Symposium, Conference of Australian Linux Users, O'Reilly's p2p conference, and the University of Michigan. He's also a member of the Open Source Advisory Panel for the US government.

Listen to his interview by Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek! Read a transcript of this interview! Watch Jeff and fellow Slashdot cofounder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda in an entertaining video blog! Print bio!