We’re acutely aware Yahoo!’s products, technology, and operating footprint increasingly have potential to intersect human rights issues — in particular freedom of expression and privacy — around the world.

Today we’re announcing the launch of our Business & Human Rights Program, and through it we hope to help define ourselves as an industry leader in this important field. It’s no secret that certain governments around the world don’t live up to widely recognized standards for protecting the free expression and privacy rights of their own citizens. While the root causes of these threats clearly lie with governments, we also know corporations have important obligations in the field of human rights.

The Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program represents another step forward in our commitment to human rights, and a number of pillars support this program:

• Executive Commitment. We’ve got it. For those of us who’ve been with Jerry in meetings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department, or with human rights activists, the long-term commitment is clear.
• Dedicated and Cross-Functional Teams. The Program will expand our core team and continue centralized leadership on global strategy, industry initiatives, business decision-making, and internal and external stakeholder engagement.
• Guiding Principles and Operational Guidelines. We’re committed to the international foundations of freedom of expression and privacy, and we’ll continue translating those principles into practical steps to be followed by our employees.
• Human Rights Touch-Point Inventory + Clearinghouse. We’ll constantly review the intersection points of our business with potential human rights issues and ensure risks are routed to the right teams.
• Human Rights Impact Assessments. We’re committed to exploring risks to freedom of expression and privacy in challenging markets, engaging with external stakeholders, and designing risk mitigation strategies.
• Internal and External Stakeholder Engagement. The single most important stakeholders are our users. We also must stay closely connected to our employees and maintain our strong relationships with industry peers, human rights groups, academics, and governments, including our own State Department.
• Accountability Framework. We also believe in designing an effective system to assess our own performance in meeting our overall goals and our operational steps relating to human rights issues.

We’re a company built on open access to information and user trust . We’ve encouraged scholarship on technology and human rights, funding two university fellowships so far. We’ve also teamed up with a noted human rights activist to create the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund. We’re deeply committed to the current collective initiative with industry peers, human rights groups, academics, and socially responsible investors to design standards to guide companies in challenging markets.

We believe companies can move forward today to integrate human rights decision-making into their business operations, and we intend to show our own leadership and commitment to freedom of expression and privacy through the creation of the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel

Anyone who knows me knows that I love sneakers. Ok, you might even say I am sneaker obsessed. From the walk-in closet with 160+ pairs of shoes, to my blog SneakerBlogger, to the custom Nike’s in Yahoo! colors I created for CES earlier this year, I try to find any way I can to incorporate them into my personal and professional life. So when I saw that Yahoo! was going to be hosting a Freecycle-inspired “Free is Good Fair” for employees on campus today (a belated Earth Day swap meet) and that one of the items being donated would be Chief Yahoo David Filo’s signature Adidas sneakers, I started cleaning out my closet.

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

I do. And so does everyone else in our Northern California offices. Her name is Danielle Bricker. And she is singularly responsible for getting people out of their gas-guzzling cars and into far-more-pleasurable, alternative modes of transportation (WiFi shuttle buses, commuter trains, light rail, bikes, van pools, carpools, etc.).

With the title of “Commute Coordinator,” Danielle is likely a maverick in Corporate America. She’s not only a cheerleader for a greener way of life (literally walking the walk), she’s there to help every Yahoo figure out the most practical way from Point A to Point B. And she has a good answer for just about every excuse you can come up with: “What if my kid gets sick in the middle of the day and I have no car?” Our guaranteed ride home program won’t cost you a dime. “But I’ll get sweaty on my bike!” We’ve got showers. “No one else works my hours.” Let me check my database of carpoolers.

Here’s a report NBC just ran about Danielle and our commute program, inspired by photos she took on a recent commute from San Francisco.

With fossil fuel flirting with $4 a gallon, you need to get yourself a Danielle.

Props to Paul Stamatiou, former Yodel intern, for his great how-to on embedding Flickr slideshows.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

There’s nothing like a pre-earnings quiet period to keep a corporate blogger on her toes. So I’ve scrounged around for some virtual hold music. And I found it in the form of a brilliant time lapse video that captures a day in the life at our headquarters, our local scenery, and the action around our Times Square billboard in NYC.

It was a little HD experiment created by Brad Williams, the production lead for Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker program. It’s his version of “Koyaanisqatsi” in three minutes.

Beats muzak.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

How do you “spread the yodel” and delight your audience without spending a million bucks? Get creative!

That’s the M.O. behind our Buzz Marketing department, a team of creative types that regularly dream up never-been-done-before gigs to get Yahoo! a bit of attention. Over the years, their more grassroots campaigns have included a Yahoo!-branded Zamboni, the first Internet-connected taxi and Amtrak train, an impromptu Shakira concert in Times Square, a search for the greenest city in America, a bachelorette living on a Los Angeles billboard in search of the perfect man, pedicabs and hot cocoa at the Olympics, and the world’s largest brain, flea market, snow globe, haystack (wherein visitors sought needles), parade of Santas, etc.

We recently empowered Yahoos to come up with Buzz campaign ideas of their own (on a shoestring, of course) to share some purple love. And two guys from our headquarters and Portland, Oregon, offices had a mind meld: surprise rainy-day train commuters with 150 Yahoo!-branded umbrellas. (What’s effective marketing without a little useful schwag?)

Alex Huang and some colleagues set up camp at dawn at a Starbucks near a Portland MAX train (the local commuter rail). Portlanders accepted their purple and white umbrellas with glee — including a transit cop, who rolled up on his Segway, not to cite them but to snag one for himself. The bumbershoots were gone within 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, down in San Francisco, Sreevatsan Rama assembled a street team outside the Caltrain station. In spite of inaccurate shower predictions by our perennially weather-befuddled meteorologists, the umbrellas went like hotcakes. When asked “Do you Yahoo?,” recipients responded with “Of course, it’s my homepage!” and oft-used product names like Mail, Maps, Search, Autos, Finance, etc. were called out into the air.

Except, of course, the guy who just smiled and pointed to the Google logo on his backpack. Oddly, he didn’t accept an umbrella.

There are plenty more ideas in the hopper. So don’t be surprised to see eager, tchotchke-laden Yahoos in a city near you. They might even make you yodel.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

What does nine years in Yahoo! Surfing/Search Editorial prepare you for? A chance to stand across the stage from Alex Trebek on Jeopardy!.

Those who can remember back to the days of portal wars, high-flying IPOs, and sock puppets probably recall when the lifeblood of Yahoo! was its hierarchical directory — a time when “browsing” was more prevalent than “searching.” That directory was assembled by a team of “surfers,” a group of intellectually curious and idiosyncratically diverse individuals whose job was to build and expand the equivalent of the Internet phone book for cool sites and useful links. They literally got paid to surf the Web. And they got damn good at trivia.

So good that our very own Dave Sikula has earned a slot as a contestant on Jeopardy! tonight, representing his hometown of Pacifica, California. Dave joined Yahoo! as a surfer in 1999. Although he came to us as an information junkie, having spent several years as the periodicals expert at the fabled Kepler’s Books, his job helped him amass vast knowledge on a wide range of subjects — everything from sports and business to arts and politics.

In short, we’ve created a know-it-all. Tune in tonight to see if Dave can nail those Daily Doubles. Go, Dave!

UPDATE 3/27/08: HE DID IT! He won! And left with $15,000 in his pocket. Tune in tonight so see if he can do it again.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

I joined Yahoo! because it’s one of the world’s great technology companies – in any industry. Yahoo! has always been at the forefront of making the Internet more useful and indispensable to everyday life – from 13 years ago, when David and Jerry first started the company, to today.

Extending our leadership requires that we constantly tap into user and advertiser insights to understand their needs – which seem to change daily.

This pace of change demands constant innovation and focused execution. To make it all happen, you’ve got to have the best team — world-class engineers and scientists researching and delivering the technologies that define the next phase of the Internet consumer experience. That was a key draw to the job here at Yahoo! — working with a brilliant group of experts from a range of fields beyond traditional computer science that include data-driven analysis, high-quality search, algorithms, and economic models. For hardcore techies, this is tackling big problems with the latest toys. For you, this means the best and brightest working to improve your online experience.

And now we have even more. In the past week we’ve expanded our Research team and centers, with new locations in Israel and India. Today in Haifa, Israel, we opened a new Yahoo! Research Lab to focus on search technologies. We’ve tapped Dr. Ronny Lempel, who comes to us from IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, to lead the new center. He will be a great addition to the top-notch team we’ve pulled together to be at the leading edge and deliver even more compelling online search experiences. His expertise in search technologies, and ties to local academia, will help us draw on the best talent and knowledge from the region and strengthen our worldwide Research efforts.

Last week in India we launched Yahoo! Labs – Bangalore to create a center of excellence for next-generation search and advertising technologies. I’m proud to say we brought in eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi, founding director of Bell Labs India, to lead this new lab. They will tackle some of the core computer science problems — specifically around data mining — and create solutions that in the long term will deliver a more relevant experience for users and advertisers. This is an important area to focus on now, as Internet content and data only continue to expand as more people and machines are connected.

Sound cool? That’s my team. That’s your team.

Ari Balogh
Chief Technology Officer

Up to now, it has been impolite to talk about gas emissions in a cafeteria. But we’re hoping to change that. At Yahoo!, I have the pleasure of working with an extremely motivated and vibrant volunteer group of 200-plus employees around the world who make up our Yahoo! Green Team. Our mission is simple – to take action, big and small, to help Yahoo! reduce its carbon footprint. As part of this effort, today we installed a new “Yahoo! Green Screen” – an interactive energy monitoring display (touch screen) that shows employees our energy usage in real-time at our Sunnyvale headquarters. The plan is to roll out other green screens to more Yahoo! campuses over time.

Empowering green actions through our employees and across our business is something we take very seriously (we launched a consumer-friendly resource for all things green called Yahoo! Green and pledged to be a carbon neutral company last year).

The Green Screen, which uses the Building Dashboard technology by Lucid Design Group presents energy usage in an easy to understand way and gives anyone who approaches the touch screen kiosk the ability to play with the information. Data can be viewed in megawatt hours, tons of carbon, or dollars. So, for example, you can see how many pounds of carbon have been emitted per person on the Sunnyvale campus from our energy usage that day. Employees will also be able to see energy consumption across buildings and compare trends viewed over time. We’re displaying dozens of “Green Tips” too – such as how to take advantage of our award-winning commute options, or where to shop for green products online. In addition to being available in our cafeteria, the Yahoo! Green Screen will be available to all employees worldwide on our corporate intranet to engage participation through suggestions, providing feedback, and just taking part in their local offices.

So now, when we lower the thermostat by 2 degrees in one of our buildings, we can immediately see the effect on energy consumption (and even carbon output).

Our hope is that this opens a healthy dialogue about our energy usage and empowers our employees to be more aware of our impact on the environment, and engages them to take action in their own way. This is one of the small pieces that helps us continue to reduce our carbon footprint and serves as a reminder that any action, no matter how big or how small, does make a difference.

Kate Gerwe
Senior Marketing Director, Corporate Partnerships and Yahoo! Green Team Leader

Photo from Jeremy Johnstone.

We’ve just heard from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and it’s my great pleasure to share that our very own Head of Yahoo! Research, Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, has been elected to join their esteemed body of members for his significant contributions to algorithms and the structure of the Web. This outstanding distinction is a first at Yahoo! (and I imagine, not the last) and is among the highest professional honors in the engineering community. This recognition places him amongst the engineers who have made the most impact, across the United States, on technology that has profound effects on society. One of the highest forms of acknowledgement an engineer could get at a national level.

Over the past couple of years, Prabhakar has led and helped build our Yahoo! Research organization to examine some of the most complex problems facing the Internet. His extensive expertise in search algorithms (he literally wrote the book on it), understanding the fundamental structure of the Web, and the social phenomena emerging from it, continues to play an important role as we work to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Web. Yahoo! Research is charged with a simple but fundamentally powerful vision: “Invent the new sciences underlying the Internet and the new ineteractive media.”

Nothing is more inspiring to me than a collection of brilliant minds. Over the past four years, our research team has grown from one small lab into a world-class research organization with seven locations in four countries (and we’re not stopping there). Under Prabhakar’s leadership, Yahoo! Research is focused on creating and exploring groundbreaking technologies that will improve our users’ online experience, from understanding communities and the new economics of the Web to the new emerging science of computational advertising, and economics and social systems to advanced search technologies.

Thanks for making us proud, Prabhakar.

Usama Fayyad
Chief Data Officer & EVP of Research & Strategic Data Solutions

Photo from sigir2007.

The last time we heard from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), they were letting us know what they thought about our use of a primate in our Yahoo! Tech launch event (we apologized). This time, they’ve crowned us with a 2008 Proggy Award for having the most vegetarian- and earth-friendly corporate cafeteria. We feel proudly redeemed.

A Proggy recognizes “animal-friendly achievement in 21st century culture and commerce…contributing to a more humane life for our entire society.” Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of Yahoos fed by Bon Appetit Management Company in our headquarters cafeteria (known as “URLs”) and beyond are provided with made-from-scratch food choices that minimize our impact on the environment. We are availed with dozens of vegetarian and vegan options, organics galore, ingredients from local farms, antibiotic-free meats, sustainable seafood, and biodegradable to-go containers. The kitchen staff even saves the vegetable oil from our fryers to create biodiesel fuel.

While an award for a corporate cafeteria might not seem worthy of great fanfare, it illustrates a big theme we Yahoos care about — finding innovative ways to help the planet. Many of the earth-friendly details are a result of input from Yahoo!’s Green Team, a volunteer army of employees who keep their eyes open for small changes that can make a big difference.

Here’s a quick video tour of URLs with Chef Bob Hart. He didn’t cook for the Grateful Dead, but he serves a mean gardein.

Kate Gerwe
Yahoo! Green Team
Senior Director, Marketing, Corporate Partnerships