The Copia Institute and the Center for a New American Security are working together on an ongoing project to facilitate better communication and collaboration between Silicon Valley and Washington. In this, our first publication from the project, we report the results of an exploratory study into key issues of shared concern and ways to promote better dialog, based on personal interviews and an online survey of subject matter experts, policy leaders, academics, technology executives, and consultants.

The report was written by Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian and includes a detailed explanation of our methodology, findings, and future plans — as well as our six key lessons for success in building collaboration between the government and the technology industry.

The full report is available as a PDF and embedded below.

Tech Companies File Amicus Brief, Still Opposed To New Trump Immigration Order

Last month, we noted that a ton of tech companies — including us at the Copia Institute — had signed on to amicus brief opposing the Trump Executive Order on immigration. As you know, the administration came out with a new executive order a few weeks later, trying to get around the multiple courts that had blocked the original order. The new order is just a cosmetic rewriting of the original one with a few small changes that the administration hopes will survive judicial scrutiny. A number of challenges have already been filed to the new order, and in one of them, brought by the state of Hawaii, a bunch of tech companies (again, including the Copia Institute) have now filed an amicus brief opposing the order. In particular, this brief focuses on the harms to the tech industry, including actual examples of harms created by this exec order:

Copia Joins Tech Leaders In Opposing Trump’s Immigration Order

Late Sunday night, virtually the entire technology industry (plus some companies from other industries as well) signed onto an amicus brief for the Ninth Circuit appeals court, calling Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers and refugees from certain countries illegal and unconstitutional.

We were thrilled to be a part of the process that helped bring together nearly every major technology company (all put together somewhat frantically on Super Bowl Sunday) to stand up for what we believe is right and against what we find to be an insult to basic humanity and the Constitution.

Innovation in America, and Silicon Valley in particular, has never waited for permission. The ease of starting companies, the low barriers to accessing capital, and (of course) the existence of an open and free internet on which anyone can build anything have all been major contributors to the vitality of Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry, which permeates nearly everyone’s daily life. The most successful companies of our time — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more — didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to innovate. They didn’t have to explain their businesses and get special licenses. They just came up with an idea and built it.

This is important.

This was the original launch post on Techdirt for the Copia Institute, on the first day of our 2015 Inaugural Summit.

A month ago, I gave a little preview of the news that we, the team behind Techdirt, were launching a new think tank and network of innovators called the Copia Institute. That launch is happening today, with our event in San Jose, and I wanted to just provide a short post on why we’re doing this, and why it’s so important.

The word “copia” is Latin for abundance — and over nearly two decades of following, researching and writing about the innovation industries, over and over again, we see that it’s the story of abundance. Of an abundance of information, certainly, but also of the role that abundance plays in everything that we do. Businesses, business models and government policies that were all built for a world of scarcity run into trouble when suddenly plopped into a world of abundance. And we see it happening every day. There are the obvious ones that we talk about all the time around here: music, movies, news and software. But it goes way beyond that. A switch from a world of scarcity to one of abundance is going to impact nearly every other industry as well: manufacturing, finance, healthcare, energy and education among others.