The period from roughly 2000 to 2007 established Doctorow as a distinctive voice at the intersection of science fiction, technology culture, and digital rights advocacy. He joined boing-boing as co-editor in 2001, just as blogging was transforming how ideas circulated online, and the site became a megaphone for his enthusiasms and concerns alike.
This era coincided with the launch of creative-commons at creative-commons-launch-2001, and Doctorow became one of its most prominent early adopters. His debut novel down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom (2003) was released simultaneously in print and as a free CC-licensed download — preceded by The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2000, with karl-schroeder) as his actual first book — — a deliberate experiment in demonstrating that creative-commons-licensing and commercial publishing were compatible. The experiment succeeded well enough that he continued the practice throughout his career.
The era also included Doctorow's work at electronic-frontier-foundation as European Affairs Coordinator, focused particularly on international copyright negotiations and digital-rights-management-critique. His advocacy work and his fiction were deeply intertwined: novels like eastern-standard-tribe and someone-comes-to-town explored themes of technological freedom and the social texture of networked life.
OpenCola — a collaborative, open-source cola recipe project Doctorow was involved with — exemplified the era's spirit of applying open-source principles to unexpected domains. The same logic that made the GPL work for software, the thinking went, could work for everything: recipes, music, writing, hardware designs.
By 2007, Doctorow was transitioning toward more explicitly political fiction and nonfiction, setting up the eff-and-fiction-era-2007-2015 that would follow.