Nominations Open for UK Open Source Awards

The UK Open Source Awards will be a day of celebration of all things Free and open with software.  Open Source is now essential in how the world works.  It creates freedom (that’s the Free Software side), helps education (I only learnt how to program from reading source code to KDE apps), allows cooperation across industries, gives a competitive advantage, encourages sharing and reuse, improves security and builds community.  So it’s worth a day of celebration and recognition.

This is the sixth UK Open Source Awards and it takes place in Edinburgh on Wednesday 12 June 2019.  There will be talks, a panel, a keynote from Frank Karlitscheck and then the award ceremony.

Nominations are now open for the awards, please consider which people or organisations based in the UK deserve special recognition.  The categories are:

Individual Award

A person who has helped improve the world through contributions to free and open source software

Company

For a commercial business which has created a successful business while contributing to open source projects, leading open source projects and spreading freedom and empowerment for users.

Public Sector and Third Sector

For a public sector or charitable organisation which has developed its software in an open source method or made innovative use of open source software or opened up data

Student

A university, college, school student or modern apprentice who has created beautiful and novel software as part of their course (dissertation, thesis etc) which is licensed as free and open source software and has curated participation in an open collaborative manner.

This award comes with a bursary of £1,500 which is to be spent on furthering the recipients education and contributions to open source for example buying a new laptop or expenses for attending conferences.

Diversity

For an open source project which has successfully encouraged contributions from people in under-represented groups, or a university, organisation or business which has broken the mould in bringing minorities to participate in open source.

I’m heading a panel of judges with Allison Randal and Dawn Foster and we’ll be looking for incredible work being done in the name of freedom, innovation and impressiveness.

Please do come along on the day, it’s free to attend and all are welcome, I hope to see you there.