Previous Finalists and Winners
2008 Winners
Open Source Contributor
Robert O'Callahan
Open Source Software Project
Silverstripe
Open Source Use in Government
Radio New Zealand
Open Source Use in Business
Egressive/Dave Lane
Open Source Use in Education
Mahara
Open Source Use for Community Organisations
FLOSS Manuals
Open Source for Infrastructure
CityLink
New Zealand Open Source Society Special Award
State Services Commission
Matthew Holloway
Finalists : Open Source Contributor
Francois Marier for contributions to Debian
Canadian born and now living in New Zealand, Francois maintains more than 25 packages for the Debian operating system. Though his work Francois gets New Zealand-made applications into popular Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, including Mahara, Docvert, MonkeyTail and MythTV Status. As a developer in his own right Francois produces safe-rm which designed to prevent accidental deletion of files.
Francois' packaging contributions to Debian
Glynn Foster for contributions to Sun open source and OpenSolaris
From its venerable origins as Sun's top class operating system Solaris, OpenSolaris is an exciting development in the free and open source space. Glynn has been working with Linux users here in New Zealand and worldwide to help OpenSolaris become a truly community-supported free and open source project. Filing bugs and patches based on his engagement with users, Glynn's efforts are helping establish a bright future for OpenSolaris.
Grant McLean for contribution to Wellington Perl Mongers
Grant has been organising the Wellington Perl Mongers for years, for nothing but a few beers and the opportunity to heckle his peers. In true free and open source spirit, the monthly Perl Monger meetings are free and there's no registration: if you're interested, just turn up. Typical of Grant's joyful approach to all things, the motto of the recent Hack Off 2008 was “coding just for fun!”.
Category winner: Robert O'Callahan for contributions to the Firefox project
Rob has been working on the Firefox project for a number of years. Now employed full-time by Mozilla Corporation, Rob has been successful in establishing a core team of four Firefox developers here in New Zealand working on making the world's best browser even better. His formula for success: “We just need to stay focused, keep making smart decisions, and keep shipping great software.”
Finalists : Open Source Software Project
Mahara for building community around free and open source eportfolios
Mahara is a Tertiary Education Commission-funded New Zealand free and open source project making a significant impact internationally. Already winning awards overseas, Mahara is challenging a number of closed commercial eportfolio offerings by evolving rapidly and providing a base of innovative web 2.0 features. A growing community of interest in Mahara is now turning a locally seeded project into one that can be self-sustaining globally.
OnlineGroups.Net for the GroupServer platform
OnlineGroups.Net has been providing custom collaborative sites for some five years, while methodically improving the GroupServer platform they run on. This year saw a milestone release of GroupServer – software that powers Steven Clift's Minnesota-based e-democracy.org community issues forums. The core team have invested considerable effort in making GroupServer scale to support large online groups, similar to Yahoo! or Google Groups.
Wikipublisher for bringing the power of LaTex to the world of wikis
Knowledge creation is a key driver of sustainable economic growth in New Zealand, and wikis are playing an increasing role in this largely collaborative activity. Wikipublisher is a unique open source project, with an avid following overseas, that turns online wiki content into beautifully typeset pages. By creating knowledge online first, Wikipublisher makes it instantly and widely accessible, while providing high quality printable documents that many prefer to read.
Category winner: Silverstripe for innovation in open source web content management
From its origins as a locally produced web content management system, Silverstripe took the open source path and has never looked back. Scoring a major coup this year with the the US Democratic National Convention website, Silverstripe is firmly on the world stage for New Zealand and open source software. With some 250 websites already showcased, Silverstripe has proven to be a versatile and rapidly evolving framework.
Finalists : Open Source Use in Government
National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Māturanga o Aotearoa for use of and contributions to open source
The National Library plays a key role in preserving and delivering New Zealand digital content, collaborating with kindred organisations both here and overseas in the process. Open source is a natural fit for the National Library, which is both a producer and user of open source software. By developing software like the web curator tool and releasing it as open source, the Library fosters the networked community it is increasingly part of. While the Library looks at all the options for new projects, open source solutions permeate the Library at many levels.
The National Library of New Zealand
State Services Commission for the newzealand.govt.nz Lightweight Content Management System
All-of-government projects are seldom lightweight, but the State Services Commission has cleverly avoided the trap of grandiosity by building a content management system that is just the right size for the task to hand. In line with the Commission's policy on intellectual property in ICT contracts, the agency will not retain control of the code, but plans to make it open for others to use through GPL licensing. In both its approach and guidance, the Commission has amply demonstrated efficacy in public expenditure on ICT.
Category winner: Radio New Zealand for content publishing using open source tools
Radio New Zealand's Richard Hulse really gets open source, and open standards. From smart technical bridges between existing systems to automated publishing processes, Richard has used open source tools following open standards to make Radio New Zealand's web presence a seamless part of the organisation's activities. If you have ever wondered how Radio New Zealand manages to get audio files on their website so quickly after an interview, ask Richard.
Retirement Commission for use of the Drupal framework for the Sorted website
The Retirement Commission's Sorted website is perhaps one of the best known government-funded sites, helping New Zealanders make financial decisions throughout life. What is perhaps less well known is that Sorted runs on the open source platform Drupal, and has done since 2001. More than one in five Kiwis have used Sorted's online calculators and range of online financial planning tools. Drupal provides the flexibility for the Commission to respond readily to changes, such as the KiwiSaver scheme, and is often first to market with new planning tools and information.
Finalists : Open Source Use in Business
Category winner: Egressive/Dave Lane for enabling open source employment in Christchurch
Dave Lane is well known and extremely active in the New Zealand open source scene, particularly in his home town Christchurch. Through Egressive – a company Dave founded way back in 1998 – the brightest and best open source talent in the Christchurch area have been brought together, promoting and supporting open source uptake throughout the region and beyond. As an evangelist in the best sense, Dave puts words into action and continues to make a significant contribution to New Zealand open source uptake.
Silverstripe for business success through open source
Silverstripe has built a successful business through an open source strategy, earning export dollars and employing some twenty people in Wellington. By opening their code to all-comers, Silverstripe have been able to tap into a global pool of interested developers, as well as initiatives like the Google Summer of Code, to extend and enhance the platform. As enthusiastic evangelists for their product, the whole Silverstripe team have raised awareness of this exciting New Zealand open source project both here and overseas.
Amie McCarron for using open source to promote New Zealand artists
As an artist in her own right, Amie was keen to share the knowledge she gained developing her own site using open source technology with her peers. Her Artlist site is one expression of that, providing a free guide to New Zealand artists. She is also enabling individual artists like Moira Marshall to showcase and sell their work online using open source software. Amie tapped into Joomla's global support forums to help throughout the build – illustrating how open source can network people together.
Finalists : Open Source in Education
Hagley College of Computing for demonstrating the value of open source in practice
Hagley College of Computing in Christchurch has been using open source software from Ubuntu desktops to 3D modelling tools since its inception. Challenging the assumption that cost is an indicator of value in the education sector, Hagley's use of open source has spread to the wider Community College, as well as to students' own computers with Ubuntu CDs being picked up from the classroom and installed on machines at home. Students are encouraged to choose the best tools for projects, looking at a range of criteria including feature sets, price, cost of implementation and level of user support.
Category winner: Mahara for a New Zealand led open source eportfolio project
In a knowledge economy, lifelong learning – both online and face-to-face – is increasingly relevant. Mahara is designed to provide people with a way to demonstrate their skills and development to a variety of audiences over time. With blogs, a resume builder and social networking, Mahara puts users in control and in touch with fellow learners, teachers and potential employers. A nationwide Mahara service is already available for schools and tertiary organisations in New Zealand: MyPortfolios.
Te Tuhi Video Game System for turning pictures into games
This project started life as an artwork installation at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Manukau City. Turning drawings on paper into video games, Douglas Bagnall has released Te Tuhi under the GPL and partially ported it to the One Laptop Per Child XO platform. While the project is still a work in progress, it demonstrates to kids of all ages a whole new way to interact and understand the computer. Using Creative Commons sounds, open source tools and running on Linux, Te Tuhi adds to Douglas' portfolio of creative uses of free software.
Docvert/Matthew Holloway for support of the Public Knowledge Project
Docvert takes office documents and quickly turns them into standards-compliant web pages, something that most organisations struggle with everyday. Started by Matthew Holloway, Docvert has been picked up by the US-based Public Knowledge Project, which is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. Docvert helps non-technical editors and authors put their work online, significantly increasing global access to knowledge and academic research.
Finalists : Open Source Use for Community Organisations
Cycling Advocates' Network for community advocacy through open source
CAN runs an online community site to connect together over 5000 cycling advocates. Through Digital Strategy funding, CAN is improving access to their extensive library of information, adding social networking and collaboration features, and delivering training to staff and volunteers so they can use the new technology. By choosing the Drupal open source framework, CAN and developers Egressive have been able to start with rich out-of-the-box features and make the best use of the initial government funding. Moreover, the system can be repurposed for other cash-poor social organisations looking to use the power of internet and open source to achieve their goals.
Category winner: FLOSS Manuals for providing free manuals for free and open source software
FLOSS Manuals is the singular vision of Adam Hyde, a New Zealander based in the Netherlands, to make quality end-user manuals freely available for popular open source software. Often less well-served by traditional publishers, FLOSS Manuals fills a need for the type of documentation that supports the uptake of open source software by ordinary, less technical users. The whole project has been run in a thoroughly open-source fashion with regular book sprints, distributed collaboration, an emphasis on quality, and all done using free software. Adam has recently added print-on-demand so you can get any number of paperback copies for your individual use or for group training. FLOSS Manuals is the official repository for Inkscape, OLPC and Sugar documentation.
SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music for using open source to improve access to New Zealand music
SOUNZ promotes New Zealand composers and New Zealand music, providing an extensive array of information and resources online through its recently redeveloped website. Using a powerful classification system few other organisations have successfully implemented, SOUNZ makes it easy to explore the many facets of our rich musical heritage, and to buy or borrow items for pleasure and learning. SOUNZ website and business applications were writing using Ruby on Rails and other open source components, making it possible to package the site for release to the community.
Brenda Wallace for tireless work with open source communities
Br3nda's a geek. Passionate about open source; passionate about technology. Whether it's SuperHappyDevHouse, Linuxchix or helping bring the biggest Linux Conference in the southern hemisphere to Wellington, Brenda Wallace is a truly remarkable person. If you don't come across her testing the One Laptop Per Child XO platform at weekend volunteer gatherings in Wellington, you'll find her virtually on Twitter, Flickr, Ohloh, Drupal and countless other support forums, and her own coffee.geek.nz blog. Did I miss anything? Oh yes, she's probably photographing you right now, and wirelessly uploading images to the interwebs.
Finalists : Open Source Use for Infrastructure
Category winner: CityLink for building network capability using open source
Everyone knows that Wellington without CityLink wouldn't be what it is today. What is less well known is that much of the magic that CityLink makes happen here relies on open source products like Zebra, Leaf and Quagga. The rock-solid infrastructure that CityLink provides through WIX and Cafenet is part of the fabric of the local IT industry and wider business community in the capital. CityLink recently connected the 500th building to their network, amongst other things making open source a vital part to the region's current and future economic well-being.
David Brownlie for contributions to infrastructure monitoring
Building a major piece of infrastructure for New Zealand like the KAREN research and education network was never going to be easy. Faced with million dollar quotes for improvements to proprietary monitoring products, David sought and delivered open source solutions at a fraction of the price. With open source monitoring toolsets that surpassed their proprietary equivalents, KAREN users can currently pull 400Mb/s to desktops, opening new opportunities for delivery of research and education across the fattest pipes in New Zealand.
National Broadband Map/State Services Commission for providing a unique national view of broadband supply and demand
The National Broadband Map brings together open source, open standards and open data to establish a unique and valuable resource for broadband planning and investment within New Zealand. All the data that the broadband map collects is freely available through open APIs and is already informing decisions around demand aggregation and priorities for investment. All the code for the project is also freely available for reuse and enhancement.
NZ Open Source Society - Special Awards
State Services Commission
Matthew Holloway
--------------------------------------------------------
2007 Winners
Open Source Ambassador
Peter Harrison
Open Source Contributor
Chris Cormack
Open Source Software Project
New Zealand Open GPS
Open Source Use in Government
State Services Commission (ICT Branch)
Open Source Use in Business
Zoomin/ProjectX
Open Source Use in Education
New Zealand Summer of Code
Open Source Use for Community Organisations
Vet Learn
Open Source for Creativity
Select Parks
New Zealand Open Source Society Special Award
NZOSVLE - Open Polytechnic
New Zealand Open Source Society Special Award
Michael Koziarski
2007 Finalists for Open Source Ambassador
Lynne Pope
Lynne has been active in the open source world for many years and has been an integral part of the leadership of many projects. She is probably most widely known for setting up the Disaster Search website in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The site enabled thousands of families to be reunited, and Lynne has already received an award from the US Ambassador for what is an outstanding use of open source technologies in extraordinary circumstances. Lynne has been actively involved in the Mambo project for several years and is the author of an extensive manual of this CMS. She also created and maintains OS Projects - a site that collects in one place information about open source. Lynne’s work has had a real, direct and positive impact on the lives of many, both in the open source community and beyond.
osprojects.info
disastersearch.org
mambo-manual.org
mambo-foundation.org
forums.b2evolution.net
Waikato Linux Users Group
Linux User Groups or LUGs have done much to spread the word and enthusiasm about open source for many years and in many countries. Providing a valuable forum for grassroots open source hackers and users to get together and share their knowledge. Waikato LUG is one of the most active in the country, thanks in large measure to its core group of committee members, past and present. The LUG has been active in organising Software Freedom Day in the Hamilton area - an annual event to raise awareness of open source, handing out over 500 CDs of free software in busy shopping malls and showing Linux to passers by, probably for the first time. Members of Waitako LUG are actively involved in numerous open source projects from the Linux Kernel to PHPwiki. The LUGs and Waikato in particular have introduced hundreds and thousands of people to the open source ethos and helped create grassroots advocacy of this approach.
www.wlug.org.nz
list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug
softwarefreedomday.org/gallery/2006/gallery/2006/oceania/nz/hamilton
Peter Harrison (Winner)
Peter Harrison not only proposed and founded the New Zealand Open Source Society in 2002, he presided over its growth and establishment until 2007. Peter’s virtues and achievements are many, and certainly worthy of recognition at these awards. Peter has been the voice of the Society in the media for the last five years. He has established a close and productive relationship with key media people, and has often been called on to give the open source viewpoint within New Zealand mainstream media. He has done so both effectively and consistently - a not-inconsiderable achievement in itself. Most recently Peter has spoken out on the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers’ Rights) Amendment Bill and has fiercely opposed wide-ranging patent applications that potentially stifle open source innovation. As President of the Open Source Society he has always dealt even-handedly with often quite differing views in the continued debate around many issues of concern to open source advocates.
www.nzoss.org.nz
www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1133
2007 Finalists for Open Source Software Project
Koha
Koha is a library management system originally written by Chris Cormack way back in 1999. It is used by 100s of libraries worldwide and has over 40 active developers. Koha is also now based in the States as part of a stable of products from open source library provider Liblime. Koha enjoys strong support from the libraries here in New Zealand that contributed to Koha’s development, and continue to use it to this day. Horowhenua Library Trust in particular were early to recognise Koha’s strengths.
Gerris Flow Solver
Gerris Flow Solver is a very different software project but one in use around the world by scientists and engineers working in the field of fluid dynamics. It stands out in this field as an open source offering amongst a number of strong commercial packages, providing anyone with the curiosity and enthusiasm to explore fluid behaviours with a rich toolset. Its modular design means Gerris will continue to expand with a growing community of developers continuing to improve the core product. Gerris is the work of Stephanie Popinet of NIWA in Wellington and it attracted a significant number of nominations from grateful and enthusiastic users both here and overseas.
Weka
Weka is another New Zealand open source project to come out of a research environment. In this case Waikato University’s Machine Learning Group. It is a world-class tool for exploring and extracting information from data. And a hugely popular one at that, with some 20-30,000 downloads per month from SourceForge over recent years. According to one nomination from Israel, Weka is the de facto standard in the machine learning community, used not because it is free, but because it is the best.
New Zealand Open GPS (Winner)
Geospatial information is becoming increasingly important for business, government and individuals. Open access to mapping information has not always been easy in New Zealand, but thanks to the efforts of Graeme Williams and his team, anyone in the world now has access to routing maps of New Zealand in a format that can be used on a wide range of GPS units. More significantly, Graeme has build a strong community of mappers who continually improve the quality and accuracy of the maps he has made available. A very open project and one that a huge number of people can benefit from today and in the future.
2007 Finalists for Open Source for Government
State Services Commission (ICT Branch) (Winner)
The work that the Commission has done through the E-government Programme has been - and continues to be - noticed overseas. Significantly the nomination to these Awards came from Malaysia, a country that has embraced open source at many levels of government. The Commission is recognised not only for giving clear guidance to agencies to consider open source alongside commercial software in their procurement processes, but also for putting that guidance into practice itself particularly with the use and reuse of a web standards compliant version of Plone, which is now being used by several agencies.
www.e.govt.nz/policy/open-source
Electoral Enrolment Centre
Maintaining a definitive record of everyone eligible to vote at any given point in time is not only a fundamental role in our system of democracy, but also no small technical and business challenge. The Electoral Enrolment Centre has since 2003 operated on an entirely open source platform - from Debian-based servers, VPNs, firewalls, mail servers and clients, databases (postgres), database replication, web servers (Apache), public web sites and intranets, call centre interfaces, the management applications, extensive network, security and application monitoring, all the way through to the Ubuntu/Openoffice based desktop PCs used by the Registrars. Through this, the Centre maintains one of the most accurate rolls in the world, in a cost effective, transparent, robust and secure fashion.
PHARMAC (Schedule Team)
Pharmac distributes the Pharmaceutical Schedule to over 9000 health professions on a regular basis and deals with some 40 million subsidy claims annually. It is - as you might imagine - a complex and extensive document. Having been told by several local printers that automatic typesetting from the Pharmac database was impossible, the Pharmac team looked at commercial options before hitting on a set of open source tools based on TeX, XML and XLink, that have enabled the team to produce both web and print versions of the Schedule in a cost effective and extensible manner. It is a problem that is not unique to Pharmac, and there are some valuable lessons to be learnt from this initiative in other sectors.
www.pharmac.govt.nz/schedule/archive/
Ministry of Social Development (Applications Development Team)
While open source is increasingly visible across the public sector, there is much happening behind the scenes too. Application development at MSD is just one example of an agency making effective use of the taxpayers’ dollar by employing open source toolsets and frameworks for almost all of their in-house development. The Ministry uses a range of tools, from Eclipse to Apache Lucene, hand-picking widely used projects which they find of high quality and which are well supported both commercially and by the community. As the development team has found “there seems to be a correlation between adopters of open source and forward-thinking, ground-breaking organisations and individuals”.
www.supergold.govt.nz/goldcard
2007 Finalists for Open Source in Education
New Zealand Summer of Code (Winner)
Google’s Summer of Code programme gets talented young technologists working on real open source projects. John Clegg of CreativeHQ - inspired by Google’s programme - has been the driving force behind New Zealand’s own Summer of Code. Now in its second year, the New Zealand Summer of Code pairs some of the brightest kiwi developers with some of the most innovative companies - many of which are represented here tonight. A huge amount of organisation and work goes into the Summer of Code by both John and his support team, bringing benefit to both the students and the companies they work for between study.
New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment
New Zealand has been a world leader in open source online learning thanks to the efforts of the Open Polytechnic and the vision of Flexible Learning’s Richard Wyles. In 2004 the Open Polytechnic launched the first large scale installation of the open source elearning platform Moodle. Chosen as much for its technical features as the strong open source development community behind the project, Moodle has become a yardstick in this field. The NZOSVLE has shown how best to manage a long-term investment in an open source project by feeding innovations back into the core project where they can be managed by the growing community of developers and users of Moodle.
moodle.org/sites/index.php?country=NZ
eduforge.org/projects/nzvle
Hagley College of Computing
Hagley College of Computing is run by Hagley Community College in Christchurch. Open source has enabled the College to establish computing courses with minimal funding, while showing the benefits and opportunities further afield. In Josh Campbell’s words “Open Source applications such as Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape and Open Office have recently been ‘leaking out’ into the wider school”. The project has both raised awareness of open source amongst students and given them access to a wider range of options for their computing experience.
computing.hagley.school.nz/about/opensource
Eduforge
Eduforge is an open access environment currently supporting over 180 open source projects in the education space, including several from New Zealand. Now in use by projects around the globe, this New Zealand initiative was born out of the need to manage a growing investment in open source in the tertiary sector. Bringing technologists and educators together with forums, wikis and source code repositories, Eduforge attracts some 1.5 million page views a month and is recognised internationally as a significant strategic initiative in distributed collaboration and the growth of open source and open standards adoption in education.
2007 Finalists for Open Source for Creativity
Upstage
Upstage is an innovative open source project that brings theatrical performance to any web browser. Upstage is in effect a venue for live performance. It allows anyone in any part of the world to participate in a live performance, and for the audience too to come from all corners of the globe. In something of a return to the very early days of theatre, the audience isn’t passive but rather participates - in this case through chat messaging. Upstage was initiated by Vicki Smith, Leena Saarinen, Karla Ptacek and Helen Varley Jamieson of Avatar Body Collision and programmed by Douglas Bagnell.
www.upstage.org.nz
www.avatarbodycollision.org
Stray Cinema
Stray Cinema is a unique experiment in film construction that has got a lot of attention here and overseas. Through Michelle Hughes’ work StrayCinema brings the open source ethos to filmmaking. Conceived right here in Wellington, Stray Cinema is to become an annual event, allowing filmmakers to remix open source footage to create new works. StrayCinema’s first outing earlier this year attracted 30 film submissions, with the top five screened at a London event in August. Not only is Stray Cinema encouraging participants to remix one source of footage, but it is a complete journey. The process begins when the film footage is released online. Participants modify the footage, submit their own version on the StrayCinema website, and finally the chosen five are navigated from the online digital world, into the ‘real world’ with the London screening.
Select Parks (Winner)
Julian Oliver and Select Parks have been representing the cutting edge of new media art for the last 10 years. Julian is a New Zealand artist, educator and developer, internationally recognised in new media and is at the forefront of artistic developments using open source game engines, open standards, open formats, and open codecs. Selectparks is a community website founded by Julian that gathers a large community world-wide to investigate and discuss the developments of creative development using open source gaming technologies. Julian’s blog is also an axis point for many in this fast growing community. Julian has made an astonishing impact on the international game art scene, pioneering work with open source technologies such as Blender, and gathering together a community of people that had no previous central axis point.
War Art Online
Archives New Zealand’s War Art Online has been created to make New Zealand’s National Collection of War Art more accessible. Archives NZ now have digital images of over 1,400 of these, taken from photographic transparencies made of the original art works several years ago. The images are displayed using the Drupal open source content management system. Significantly, Archives is using the community elements of Drupal to allow the public to comment on the works, an opportunity speaks well of Archives' commitment to making their holdings available digitally on the web.
NZ History.Net
NZHistory.Net is another strong nomination from the public sector, again using the open source content management system Drupal. The Ministry of Culture and Heritage was one of the first government departments to adopt open source and NZHistory.Net is a great example of how successful this can be, attracting over 400,000 page views a month. It has served as an example for other departments looking at open source toolsets and the benefits of open APIs, and is a great credit to Jamie Mackay and his team at MCH.
www.nzhistory.net.nz
www.drupal.org
www.timebased.com
Access Radio
With over 700 media items in 25 languages Access Internet Radio is the most diverse source of on-line voices from Aotearoa/New Zealand. The project started in late 2006, with three Community/Access broadcasters, CityLink as corporate partner and the Digital Strategy Community Partnerships Fund. Access Internet Radio enables local minority groups to broadcast themselves on the Internet (Live Streaming, On-Demand, Pod-Casting). Access Radio’s Media Manager is built on open source technologies and is enabling them to use video with New Zealand’s first sign language programme in May this year.
www.accessradio.org.nz
www.communityradio.co.nz
2007 Finalists for Open Source Contributor
Michael Koziarski
Within the development community, Michael Koziarski - or Koz - needs no introduction. Based here in Wellington, Koz is known internationally as one of the core developers of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, which also needs no introduction for developers, is a framework that can build web applications in a matter of minutes not weeks. Rails is the tool of choice for many Web 2.0 startups, including a number in New Zealand, enabling them to very rapidly produce quite complex applications and to remain adaptable as their products mature. Rails is sexy stuff and Koz’s work has put New Zealand on the map in a big way.
Chris Cormack (Winner)
Chris got the library management system Koha off the ground and into 100s of libraries worldwide. He has continued to build a community of developers around Koha to grow the project and add innovative features. Chris is a Perlmonger - a special breed of person - deserving of an Award in their own right!
Graeme Williams
The judges wanted to recognise Graeme's individual contribution to the New Zealand Open GPS project. Graeme’s enthusiasm and commitment have ignited a community of interest that has seen a need and filled it - the way many open source projects begin, but only the best succeed.
Matthew Cruickshank
Matthew created the Docvert project to “scratch an itch”. He saw the need for a truly open system to convert Word documents to the sort of HTML that anyone can use, even if they are using assistive technologies. Through his individual efforts any government department or business that wants to put large documents on the web can do so in the way the web is meant to work - using open accessible standards. Docvert is already used by several government departments here in New Zealand and word is spreading fast overseas. Matthew is also making significant contributions to the on-going opposition to OOXML’s adoption by the ISO as a second office document standard, something that has been fiercely debated in many countries of late.
docvert.org
docvert.com/demo/3.2.3/sample-use.php
2007 Finalists for Open Source for Community
Vet Learn (Winner)
The VetLearn Foundation is a not-for-profit providing continuing education for the New Zealand Veterinary profession. Over 700 students have participated in the Foundation’s VetScholar Programme since it was launched in early 2006 - that’s roughly 20% of the entire profession. In its first year of operation, VetScholar covered all the setup and development costs for the service, which is based on the open source Moodle e-learning platform and OSCommerce. This nomination demonstrates that even small not-for-profits can benefit from this approach, and offer world class capabilities to their constituents.
Citizen Click/ Egressive
Citizen Click and Christchurch-based Egressive teamed up to deliver - in as little as three weeks - a rich Drupal website for the Onehunga Enhancement Society. As Kate Taylor of Citizen Click said in her nomination, “My client is no longer a couple of people with a vision, they are an active group with 200-plus paid up members.” Egressive who are at the centre of an active open source provider network in Christchurch continues to provide enhancements to the site, with plans to feed some of the new features back to the Drupal community
Aotearoa Independent Media Centre
Aotearoa IMC is the local node of the Global Network of Independent Media Centres, more commonly known as Indymedia. Publishing the work of independent/citizen journalists and alternative political debate, the IMC has undergone a couple of technology changes. Most notably, New Zealanders are in the process of migrating the IMC to the open source Drupal platform. Indymedia is committed to a free and open source approach from Linux on the desktop to the use of open standards, to underpin their Principles of Unity.
aotearoa.indymedia.org
indymedia.org.nz/mod/info/display/principles
Julian Priest (Consume/WSF II)
Julian (living in Wanganui) is the founder of London’s Consume network, the first large scale open wireless network in any major international city. Consume was developed using modular nodes which were largely Linux based. Later the network also evolved to include the Hive Networks system which is entirely open source. Julian’s projects always contain an ‘open source’ ideology as well as technology. He is also heavily involved in the World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures.
consume.net
informal.org.uk/people/julian/publications/the_state_of_wireless_london
hivenetworks.net
informal.org.uk
2007 Finalists for Open Source for Business
Zenbu
Zenbu is like the Yellow Pages on steroids. Using mapping and a community-built directory of well over 36,000 places, business and points of interest, Zenbu is already streets ahead of more traditional business directories. Zenbu’s points of interest are feeding into another of our Finalist’s projects - Open GPS - and Zenbu’s growing network of wifi hotspots across the country complete the circle. When you’re in a Zenbu hotspot you can easily find local services like the nearest bank or cafe. And the entire Zenbu project has been developed by just one person: Sam Giffney.
Plan HQ
PlanHQ is a project that stands on its own merits - which are considerable. PlanHQ is a world class web 2.0 business - smart, fleet, connected, packaged. It shows that New Zealand IT businesses can and should compete for a global market position with the very best products, using an open source technology that doesn’t stand in the way of rapid adaption and continued innovation.
New Zealand Post/Red Hat
Red Hat and New Zealand Post need no introduction. For an operation the size of Post’s, enterprise-grade support of the kind provided by Red Hat is what’s needed. With growing demands and smaller budgets, IT departments of larger corporations are finding they can do more with less using supported open source solutions. And Post has proven this conclusively with reduced costs across the board and performance boosts that make you wonder why more New Zealand organisations aren’t moving in this direction. Hats off to Red Hat for their support of these Awards and the significant part they play in bringing open source solutions to some of the larger players in New Zealand’s business sector.
www.nzpost.co.nz
www.redhat.com
Zoomin/ProjectX (Winner)
Zoomin have been pioneers in online mapping in New Zealand. John Clegg and his team have brought browser-based mapping services to New Zealand that are on a par with those of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Using open source, ProjectX has launched a successful business that delivers Smaps through TradeMe and has over 30 other websites nationwide employing ProjectX mapping. ProjectX has significantly enhanced the kaMap system, which along with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and Mapserver, is the open source technology behind it all - providing some of these improvements back to the core project.
www.zoomin.co.nz
www.smaps.co.nz
Silverstripe
Silverstripe took the bold step of open sourcing an established web content management system, and haven’t looked back since. By making the product open and freely available, they have effectively created a global market for the services they now offer around the core CMS. That means real exports for New Zealand that would never have happened on the same scale with Silverstripe’s origins as a local proprietary system. They also have access to individual developers feeding back into the open source and have caught the eye of Google - providing Summer of Code students to innovate and extend Silverstripe. Expect to see some great things from the team down the track.
New Zealand Open Source Society Special Awards
Two Special Awards were presented by the New Zealand Open Source Society recognising the exceptional contributions of Michael Koziarski and the impact of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment work spearheaded by the Open Polytechnic.
