Pete Ashdown
From Pete Ashdown Campaign Collaboration Wiki
This article is taken in whole or in part from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Peter "Pete" Lynn Ashdown (born January 11 1967) is the founder and CEO of Utah's first independent and oldest Internet service provider, XMission, and a 2006 Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Utah, challenging incumbent Orrin Hatch. Ashdown aims to challenge Hatch's stances on technology, copyright, and file sharing.
Early life, education, and career
Pete Ashdown was born in a Salt Lake City hospital to Robert and Greta Ashdown, and grew up in Bountiful, Utah. Robert had several jobs (though not concurrently), working as a machinist, an elementary school teacher, and a professor of manufacturing design at Salt Lake Community College. Greta, an immigrant from Denmark, ran the family business of importing kitchenware from Finland. Throughout his adolescence and young adulthood, Pete held jobs of bussing tables at a Japanese restaurant, working for an electrical contractor, computer sales and repair, and data entry.
Pete graduated from Woods Cross High School in 1985 and attended Salt Lake Community College, subsequently transferring to the University of Utah to study filmmaking. Here Pete discovered his love of technology and instead began studying computer science.
Throughout the early 1990s, Pete was a promoter and participant in rave culture, importing acid house music to Utah and throwing concerts with partner John Webster. Though these concerts certainly played host to drugs such as ecstasy, Ashdown did not participate, saying later, "I never took drugs during the raves, and I never encouraged anyone to do so [...] I made an effort to not equate raves with drugs. A large reason why I left the scene is that it became more of a dealer and pusher situation." [1]
While at the University of Utah, Pete was hired by local computer graphics firm Evans & Sutherland as a computer operator and admin assistant. Greta Ashdown died in 1990, and Pete's father Robert urged him to start his own business. In 1993, at the age of 26, he started XMission with an investment from his father, and in 1994 he left Evans & Sutherland.
In 1998 Pete married his wife Robin. They have three children, named Madeleine, Henry, and Greta. Greta was born October 11th, 2005, during his Senate campaign.
2006 U.S. Senate election
Ashdown is the only Democrat who filed to run against incumbent Republican Senator Orrin Hatch in the 2006 Senate election, and will therefore be on the November 2006 ballot.
Ashdown has said that he is "disgusted" by Hatch's policies regarding technology, such as the INDUCE Act, which limit technological freedoms. He supports the ideals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has said that if elected, he will try to reform copyright law in ways advocated by the EFF.
In July 2005, Ashdown was endorsed by the blog Boing Boing for the election. [2]
Ashdown is believed to be the first politician to use a wiki to develop his campaign platform.
