The 2011 Open Source Awards

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This month, Packt Publishing began accepting nominations for its 2011 Open Source Awards. Breaking tradition, I've declined the invitation this year to be a member of the judging panel of this award (I've been a judge for the past four years). Regardless of my lack of participation as a judge, I still think this a great award and merits mention here on my blog.

Although there can be some controversy of declaring a "best CMS" in any award, I think Packt has done a great job in helping promote those open source applications that become a nominee for this award. I know for myself, I've found great value in the "most promising" category for identifying up and coming open source projects. In fact, I'll even argue that there are a few content management projects out there that still would be unknown if it wasn't for the Packt Open Source Award. Prize money alone given by Packt to the various open source project winners since 2006 tops $100,000.

Julian Copes from Packt announced the start of awards in late July with promise of improvements and new categories for this year's version of the Awards.

Packt will be launching its annual Open Source Awards in 2011 and once again we have worked to make the Awards bigger and better. Staying true to Packt’s values for the Awards of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding Open Source projects, we’ve introduced and altered categories to allow a greater scope of projects to take part.

We have given a lot of thought to the changes we intend to put in place, and we feel this will enable Packt to further its support for projects both new and old.

So what are the changes?

pTools Intranet accessed by over 50,000 staff

pTools Software today announced the completion of one of the largest public sector IT projects undertaken in Ireland to date. The HSE intranet, which is built on pTools Content Management Software (CMS), provides information and services for all of its 100,000 strong workforce, and will be regularly accessed by over 50,000 HSE staff from a network of more than 25,000 computers. Key features of the intranet include access to daily staff news, briefings and reports, staff email and contact directories, medical libraries and other resources. pTools was awarded the contract following a competitive tender process and worked with HSE ICT Services and the Communications divisions over an eighteen month period to deliver the new intranet. Known as HSEnet, it provides a single unified location for internal online content for all HSE staff and, since going live in November 2007, is already receiving more than 750 thousand page impressions per month and is expected to exceed 1 million page impressions in the coming months.

XOOPS Foundation gets an official Web site

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The XOOPS Foundation just announced that they have gone live with the XOOPS Foundation Web site.  The purpose of the site is to help bring transparency to its open source community on the role it hopes to play in the in the current and future directions of the XOOPS Project. 
This site will allow you to contact the XOOPS Foundation directly: in order to request support for XOOPS related projects (liaison, conferences, exhibitions, publicity, documentation, representation, and more). It will also allow you to donate to future XOOPS Foundation projects, to allow the continued support to the Community & Project.
In 2007 XOOPS has gone through an internal struggle to better define XOOPS as a project and a community.  All projects mature at some point where it must be asked whether the project is still as valid and worthwhile as it once was.  We wish them well in their endeavors.

Find the open source survey, Save the doctor

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Here is your chance to help out the academic scholars figure out what open source is all about. Lara Thynne, a PhD candidate at Deakin University Australia, is running a survey to be used in examining the motivation of open source users when it comes to participating in open source projects and using open source software. Ms. Thynne's difficulty is that she is needing around 1500 completed surveys and hasn't quite connected with the open source communities to "get the job done".

I encourage anyone in the open source community to take some time and fill out the survey. Personally, I found the survey interesting by what questions she chose to ask in her survey and maybe more interesting which questions she may have left out of the survey. She claims the survey takes only 5 to 10 minutes, but to be honest it took me a full 15 minutes (maybe I'm just slow). I am not sure how much traffic the server can can handle, so if you can't make a connection right away you might want try again at a later time. The link to the survey is: https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/ .

Brad Baker: What is contributing to an Open Source Project?

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Brad Baker posted on the Joomla! Developer Network an article discussing how one can can contribute to their open source community. While Mr. Baker's article are focused on Joomla!, I think his comments could apply to any open source project. I especially like how he concludes his article.

There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted. So, will you contribute? If so, I look forward to seeing you in the community, genuinely helping people, in any way you can, within the current provisions that exist.

Explaining to someone how an open source community actually works is difficult. In my opinion the author has captured with his words a universal truth regarding open source projects. Try replacing Joomla in the above excerpt with Wordpress, Drupal, Radiant, e107, mojoPortal, or another favorite open source project and you'll see what I mean.  Some experiences in open source are universal.