Home M3AAWG Blog The M3AAWG J.D. Falk Award Recognizes People Building a Better Online World

In 2011, M3AAWG established the J.D. Falk Award to recognize people committed to making a better online world. The award was established in honor of Falk, a founding member of M3AAWG and a deeply passionate and creative individual with a spirit of volunteerism and community building.

The security, email, messaging and related communities can submit nominations for the award by August 9, 2022 here https://www.m3aawg.org/events/jd-falk-award.

Within M3AAWG, Falk worked with the technical committee and was chairman of the program committee, chief document editor and a member of the board of directors. He was deeply engaged in the organization’s meetings; he constantly sought to elevate the quality of the speakers and panels and to make meetings more useful, interesting and productive. He created the role of MAAWG document editor to help the MAAWG membership produce best practices and white papers of lasting significance.

Outside of M3AAWG, Falk was responsible for the development of several feedback loop RFCs in process at the IETF. In the spirit of the Internet that J.D. loved, an RFC editor worked through the night recently to finalize his paper based on the best practices so that it could be published as RFC 6449 during the last few days of his life. He also authored other documents that ended up being critical to IETF RFCs, including work on BCP applicability, MARF data redaction recommendations and feedback loop discovery.

The award seeks to recognize efforts for a particularly meritorious item of work rather than recognizing a lifetime of achievement. (The M3AAWG Mary Litynski Award honors lifetime achievement.)

Examples of accomplishments considered for the J.D. Falk Award include developing a service, authoring a specification or related documentation, inventing a security mechanism or other technology, mentoring a community, or pursuing notable research related to Internet abuse.

The work can be in an academic or corporate context and can be an individual, group or institutional effort.

The award includes an honorarium underwritten by J.D.’s employer, Return Path Inc., now Validity, Inc. M3AAWG will also sponsor the winning candidate's attendance at the October M3AAWG general meeting where the award will be presented.

Submissions can be made here https://www.m3aawg.org/events/jd-falk-award.

Recent awardees include: Coalition Against StalkWare

Charles A. “Tod” Eberle IV Chief, National Security & Cyber Section U.S. Attorney’s Office | Western District of Pennsylvania

Ronnie Tokazowski and the BEC List

Germany's Lower Saxony Chief Police Inspector Jörn Bisping and Senior Prosecutor Frank Lange - Avalanche Takedown

    André Leduc - Operation Safety-Net and Canadian Anti-spam Legislation (CASL)

The 2022 J.D. Falk award will be presented during the 56th meeting of M3AAWG October 10-13. More info, including a link to submit session ideas, can be found here https://www.m3aawg.org/upcoming-meetings.

The views expressed in DM3Z are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect M3AAWG policy.