OpenUK Awards 2021, COP26 and KDE

The OpenUk awards reconise and celebrate the best in open tech in the UK over the last year. We have a bunch of awards this year and the shortlists are up. I’ve clerked the judges into tracking down the gossip on all the shortlisted nominees and we do have final winners which will be announced at the ceremony on Thursday evening.

The ceremony is at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. This is the UN conference to try to get international agreement on mitigating the worst affects of the climate crisis. We’ll be one of the last events there.

I’ll be making announcement about KDE’s sustainability effort in front of the politicians and tech audience which I’m very excited about.

You can sign up to watch the day event on sustainability in tech. The evening award ceremony will have its video published shortly after the event.

Who’s is nominated I hear you ask?

OpenUK Awards Shortlist 2021

Belonging – sponsored by Osmii

Pride at SUSE – Rob Knight – executive lead and ambassador for “Pride at SUSE”

Red Hat B.U.I.L.D UK&I – Ally Kouao – who set up the UK and Ireland chapter of Red Hat’s Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity (B.U.I.L.D.)

Endless Compute – Endless’ commitment to open source and an inclusive community goes beyond their own work sharing their OS to promote digital inclusion, to sponsoring the creation of the GNOME Community Engagement Awards, promoting bringing people into open source.

Data: 

Open Knowledge Foundation – a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data

Viæ Regiæ project – Viæ Regiæ project aims to extract data on early modern transport networks from historic maps and documents in Britain

Code the City – is dedciated to the use of tech and data for civic good

Hardware – sponsored by The Stack

Lime Micro – Lime Micro specialises in field programmable RF (FPRF) transceivers, SDR platforms and ecosystem technology for the next generation of wireless broadband systems.

Gatecat – developer of nextpnr, the open source FPGA place and route tool

DevTank, HILTOP – Tim Telford – Devtank are an open source test and measurement business dedicated to supplying high quality solutions to businesses across many sectors including space, aerospace, telecoms, defence and green energy

Finance – sponsored by FINOS

Starling Bank – Starling Bank has built its business on open source software

Wise – open source technologies: MariaDB, Envoy and Orchestrator

Software – sponsored by GitLab

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health – Their Child Health Digital Growth API wraps all complexity the of child growth in a simple REST API

The Herald Proximity Project – creates an opensource and privacy focused Proximity Measurement and Digital Contact Tracing solution

Open Health Hub – runs an open forum, which provides the only completely independent, open internet-facing, and free place to discuss health technology in the UK’s four NHSes

Sustainability – sponsored by Centre for Net Zero

Turing Institute – The Turing Way – The Turing Way is an open-source project that involves and supports its diverse community to make data science reproducible, ethical, collaborative and inclusive for everyone.

Icebreaker One – an independent, non-partisan non-profit with global reach, which aims to influence investment decisions of $3.6T/year to deliver net-zero by 2030

DevTank, Open Smart Monitor – Tim Telford – an open source test and measurement business

Individual – sponsored by Open Source Connections 

Catherine Stihler – Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation

Kevin Mayfield – an integral part of the Open Health Hub

Cheryl Hung – VP ecosystem at the Cloud Native Foundation

Young Person (under 25) – sponsored by JetStack

Lowena Hull – Lowena has been volunteering and speaking at events to promote girls in technology

Samuel Van Stroud – Turing Data Stories has the goal of developing an open-source platform that enhances the understanding of the world around us through

Paul Ogbonoko Owoicho – PhD candidate who researches Mixed-Initiative interaction for Conversational Search System

See you there!