Among the finalists for the second Open Source Awards are an online document converter, a typesetting engine and the State Services Commission’s broadband map.
The awards received close to 100 nominations this year.
Open source shop Catalyst IT, which is organising the awards, to be held in Wellington in the end of September, says it is pleased to see so many new projects.
“We were a bit worried there wouldn’t be as many nominations as last year, or that we would see the same projects,” says Catalyst’s Don Christie.
But a lot of new projects have been nominated this year, both individual and government projects, he says.
Last year, Christie and co-organiser Chris Daish were hoping the awards would become an annual event, and it looks like they have reached that goal.
The sponsors were keen to do it again too, both industry giants, such as Google, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, as well as local players, says Daish.
Among the finalists is Matthew Holloway’s online document converter Docvert, which converts Microsoft Word files to HTML. Holloway was nominated by an academic institute in California, which uses the web application to improve public access to public research.
Another finalist is Wikipublisher, created by John Rankin of Affinity, says Christie. Wikipublisher is a typesetting engine that re-purposes web content for print.
Wellington-based Silverstripe is also a finalist, as well as the e-portfolio project Mahara.
The SSC’s National Broadband Map and Wellington’s CityLink network are finalists in the Open source use for infrastructure category, which is new for this year.
The finalists are:
Open Source Contributor
Francois Marier for contributions to Debian;
Glynn Foster for contributions to Sun open source and OpenSolaris;
Grant McLean for contribution to Wellington Perl Mongers;
Robert O’Callahan for contributions to the Firefox project.
Open Source Software Project
Mahara for building community around open source eportfolios;
OnlineGroups.Net for the GroupServer platform;
Wikipublisher for bringing the power of LaTex to the world of wikis;
Silverstripe for innovation in open source web content management.
Open Source Use in Government
National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa for use of and contributions to open source;
State Services Commission for the newzealand.govt.nz Lightweight Content Management System;
Radio New Zealand for content publishing using open source tools;
Retirement Commission for use of the Drupal framework for the Sorted website.
Open Source Use in Business
Egressive/Dave Lane for enabling open source employment in Christchurch;
Silverstripe for business success through open source;
Amie McCarron for using open source to promote New Zealand artists.
Open Source in Education
Hagley College of Computing for demonstrating the value of open source in practice;
Mahara for a New Zealand led open source eportfolio project;
Te Tuhi Video Game System for turning pictures into games;
Docvert/Matthew Holloway for support of the Public Knowledge Project.
Open Source Use for Community Organisations
Cycling Advocates’ Network for community advocacy through open source;
FLOSS Manuals for providing free manuals for free and open source software;
SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music for using open source to improve access to New Zealand music;
Brenda Wallace for tireless work with open source communities.
Open Source Use for Infrastructure
CityLink for building network capability using open source;
David Brownlie for contributions to infrastructure monitoring;
National Broadband Map/State Services Commission for providing a unique national view of broadband supply and demand.