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Ngā Tohu Pūmanawa Herekore o Aotearoa 2010

NZOSA Awards 2010

2010 Winners and Finalists


Winner - Open Source in Government
IRD’s use of Moodle

Winner - Open Source Advocate
Linux.conf.au organisers Andrew & Susanne Ruthven

Winner - Open Source in Business 
Ponoko – the hub of a global personal manufacturing eco-system that brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers to make almost anything

Winner - Open Source in the Arts
Ghosts in the Form of Gifts – the use of open source technologies and design to recreate some of the lost treasures of the Te Papa collection from photographs and drawings.

Winner - Open Source in Education
Albany Senior High School

Winner - Open Source Project
SilverStripe – a New Zealand-made CMS that has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally in less than four years

Winner - Open Source Contributor
Tabitha Roder for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Winner - People's Choice Award
Amie McCarron for the Alcoholics Anonymous New Zealand websites; the public facing site, service/members site and annual convention website

 


Finalists - Open Source in Government

Winner: Inland Revenue's use of Moodle
Inland Revenue deployed Moodle as its Learning Management System in 2006 and has been a leader for NZ Government agencies in its use and adaptation. Inland Revenue’s 6200 staff access around 1200 courses, both face-to-face and e-learning. It has been consistently proactive in championing Moodle to other agencies, initiating working with other agencies to develop common business functionality, and supporting other agencies in their Moodle journey. Usage levels have consistently grown as has the diversity of training and development resources available.

NIWA Ocean Survey 20/20 Portal
The Ocean Survey 20/20 portal was developed to enable expert and public access to data, information and reports from the Bay of Islands OS20/20 survey. This is the single broadest marine survey ever carried out in New Zealand, funded through LINZ, who contracted NIWA to carry out the research. NIWA contracted Silverstripe to develop the web portal for the survey. This openly and proudly open source portal extends the Open Data model in that not only is the survey data discoverable and downloadable, but so are presentations, reports, maps, and other information that accompanies the data, which makes the survey directly relevant to the general public.

DigitalNZ’s initiative to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use
Digital NZ is an initiative that aims to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use. The most significant service operated by DigitalNZ is a search service that uses an open API to aggregate metadata from more than 100 organisations that hold NZ images, documents, and media. Additionally, DigitalNZ runs various supporting websites with open source software, including a service that allows the public to build their own NZ search engine, a shared research repository for object hosting, and a community driven helpdesk for digitisation support.

Inland Revenue's Online Consultation
Traditionally, Inland Revenue's Policy Advice Division has consulted through the distribution of large documents which require extensive reading and formal responses. In 2009 the Policy team wanted to consult a broader representation of the population on potential changes and created the 'Student Loans Online Forum', which required customisation of the open source forum tool 'Vanilla' and received nationwide acclaim as a groundbreaking step towards e-democracy and more 'citizen-centric' consultation. In 2010 the 'Simplifying Customer Interaction Online Consultation' was created for potential changes to the tax system and is accessible to everyone, can be maintained and modified with ease, and serves as the first building block in the all of government web toolkit.


Finalists - Open Source in Education

Winner: Albany Senior High School
Albany Senior High School is New Zealand's first state-funded senior high school, and its Open Source Initiative makes it a prototype for new schools being built in this country. It is a school founded on values of openness, honesty, fairness, transparency and collaboration. These values find their expression in the digital age through a commitment to open standards, open source software and open education. The decision to forego proprietary standards in favour of open systems represents a significant departure from the prevailing wisdom about e-learning in New Zealand schools and a break from the long-standing bulk purchasing deal with Microsoft.

R Project
In computing, R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is an implementation of the S programming language created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs, combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software, and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis.

Tabitha Roder
New Zealand’s One Laptop per Child test group, led by Tabitha Roder, is the largest OLPC volunteer group in the world. Tabitha created the popular group that has met weekly for over two years, first in Wellington and now in Auckland, to ensure successful deployments to the children of the world. Tabitha liaises with the main OLPC project and activity developers to create test schedules, write test reports, keep track of the XO laptops and support the NZ volunteers who work on the project. She is active on voice conference with the OLPC HQ in Boston and is frequently on IRC talking to developers, educators, translators, and providing tech support.

Paul Seiler
Paul Seiler has been instrumental in furthering informed decision making around free software in the school sector in New Zealand. He has implemented an open and transparent community approach to discussing priorities and issues pertaining to the Managed Learning Environment initiative of the Ministry of Education. He has extended the open model by launching a national initiative to promote reusable and portable content for the New Zealand curriculum and spearheaded the launch of OERNZ. Paul's tireless work in facilitating open dialogue through the MLE list has resulted in one of the largest community discussion lists on ICTs in education in New Zealand.


Finalists - Open Source in Business

Winner: Ponoko
Since it’s inception at the end of 2007, Wellington-based Ponoko’s goal was to create the world’s easiest 'making' system, allowing custom products to be created effortlessly. Their vision was to reinvent how goods are designed, made and distributed worldwide. Ponoko has since become the hub of a global personal manufacturing eco-system that brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers to make (almost) anything. Based on on an open source stack, Ponoko’s platform allows users to make their creations available through Creative Commons licensing for both real world production and download.

SilverStripe
SilverStripe Limited is a prime example of a New Zealand owned and managed business making substantial and innovative use of open source. SilverStripe is the company behind the development, sales, and marketing of SilverStripe CMS. Known as a 'web content management system', the software is used to build and manage complex websites, web applications, and intranets. The software has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally since its launch under four years ago.

MusicHype
MusicHype.com is an online music venue that uses a custom built 'Appreciation Engine' to reward & track fans across all major online social networks, while increasing revenue for artists and labels. Many artists don't have the expertise or time to run a successful online campaign that complements their offline promotion. MusicHype uses its Appreciation Engine to make online artist promotions easy and effective. Bands tap into the MusicHype services and community to promote and market their merchandise, concert tour, album or EP across all the available social networks. They also utilize the platform to encourage, track and reward specific fan behavior.

The Adaxa Suite
Adaxa is a New Zealand based company that has been supporting fully commercial open source ERP/CRM projects in New Zealand and Australia since 2003. Adaxa's goal has been to create a potent, capable and cost-effective suite of business applications that lives up to the promise of open source in the enterprise environment. To accomplish this, they have created the Adaxa Suite of ERP, CRM, Document Management, VoIP, CMS and BI tools. It combines tools and data in one place, removes replication and silos of data usually kept in spreadsheets and isolated business applications, all through an open framework built in open technologies like Java, Tomcat, and Postgres.


Finalists - Open Source in the Arts

Winner: Ghosts in the Form of Gifts
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith brought together designers and open source technologies to recreate some of the lost treasures of the Te Papa collection from photographs and drawings. This project used open source machines - the RepRap - to recreate physical artifacts from Te Papa that had been lost or destroyed over the years. The finished files for the artifacts were released under a Creative Commons licence so that anyone who wished to could create their own exhibits. Most of these represented items of significance to Pacific cultures.

Libsparrow
Douglas Bagnall created Libsparrow, an artwork entirely based on open source software that has been shown at the Dowse Art Gallery. At its core is a Gstreamer plugin that, with a camera and projector, makes things disappear in the real world by projecting a calibrated negative image upon them. The original image is further hidden by overlaying a video of sparrows in flight upon it. Two instances of this plugin, each with its own projector, compete for control of a single screen, and as each projection tries to impose its own sparrows, the video escalates into unstable feedback patterns which people can disrupt by walking in front of the projectors or camera, leaving behind strobing trails.

Speed of Sound
The Speed of Sound project is a music visualiser initiated in late 2009 by two open source programmers, Joel Pitt and Will Marshall. It builds on the open source Processing visualisation system and ties together a number of other external open source libraries for processing. Joel and Will have taken a concept and made it reality by hooking it up to a controller (the Jazz mutant lemur), and submitted patches to parent projects where possible to fix bugs. They've improved the stability so it can be used in live environments, including dance parties and installations around Wellington.


Finalists - Open Source Project

Winner: SilverStripe
SilverStripe Limited is a prime example of a New Zealand owned and managed business making substantial and innovative use of open source. SilverStripe is the company behind the development, sales, and marketing of SilverStripe CMS. Known as a 'web content management system', the software is used to build and manage complex websites, web applications, and intranets. The software has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally since its launch under four years ago.

Kete
Kete is a collaboration engine that enables communities to tell their own stories online with images, audio, video and documents. The community writes topics, links them, and categorises content for discussion. People can describe their material in their own words using natural language tags and are not limited by approved subject headings. Kete's built in discussion functionality allows communities to add comments and feedback to items and categories. Kete sites range from communities associated with libraries to communities with specific language and cultural interests.

R Project
In computing, R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is an implementation of the S programming language created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs, combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software, and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis.


Finalists - Open Source Advocate

Winner: Andrew and Susanne Ruthven
LCA2010 (Linux.conf.au) was a large, professionally run conference in January 2010 dedicated to Linux and related open source projects which brought together geeks from Australasia and the rest of the world. Andrew and Susanne dedicated a year of their lives to the mammoth task of organising and hosting LCA2010 in Wellington. Feedback from conference attendees was overwhelmingly positive and many regulars felt it was the best LCA ever. Andrew and Susanne are also supporting the team who will be hosting LCA2011 in Brisbane.

Jayne Wallis and Ruth McDavitt
Software Freedom Day is a free public event that raises awareness of free and open source software and gets members of the public directly involved in the best traditions of grassroots activism. Jayne and Ruth led the effort to put together and successfully run this year's Software Freedom Day Event in Wellington. Synchronized with the worldwide Software Freedom Day, the Wellington event attracted hundreds of people, including many secondary students. Kids and adults alike were engaged in discussions, demonstrations, hacking and general participation in an array of open source efforts, topics and programs.

Tabitha Roder
New Zealand’s One Laptop per Child test group, led by Tabitha Roder, is the largest OLPC volunteer group in the world. Tabitha created the popular group that has met weekly for over two years, first in Wellington and now in Auckland, to ensure successful deployments to the children of the world. Tabitha liaises with the main OLPC project and activity developers to create test schedules, write test reports, keep track of the XO laptops and support the NZ volunteers who work on the project. She is active on voice conference with the OLPC HQ in Boston and is frequently on IRC talking to developers, educators, translators, and providing tech support.


Finalists - Open Source Contributor

Winner: Tabitha Roder for One Laptop Per Child
New Zealand’s One Laptop per Child test group, led by Tabitha Roder, is the largest OLPC volunteer group in the world. Tabitha created the popular group that has met weekly for over two years, first in Wellington and now in Auckland, to ensure successful deployments to the children of the world. Tabitha liaises with the main OLPC project and activity developers to create test schedules, write test reports, keep track of the XO laptops and support the NZ volunteers who work on the project. She is active on voice conference with the OLPC HQ in Boston and is frequently on IRC talking to developers, educators, translators, and providing tech support.

Andrew Caudwell for Gource
In September 2009, Andrew released Gource, a tool for visualizing the history and development of software projects. Typically as software is developed, incremental changes to files are grouped together as ’commits’ and are stored in a Version Control System, maintaining a history of which files were changed, by whom, and when. Gource takes this history and plays it back as an interactive animation with the root directory of the project appearing as the centre of an animated tree, and directories as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.

Eion Robb for Pidgin
Pidgin is a cross-platform instant messenger client that talks to a range of instant messenger servers, such as Facebook, Skype, OkCupid, and Omegle. It also allows the new voice and video extensions to compile under Windows. Eion spends much of his spare time contributing to libpurple/Pidgin either by coding plug-ins or patches, or by providing helpful support by email and in the #pidgin IRC chatroom. The creation of the Facebook and Skype plugins for Pidgin has enabled a large userbase of blind computer users to utilise screenreaders to talk to their friends on IM protocols.

Resolve Digital for Refinery CMS
Five years ago David Jones from Resolve Digital based in Christchurch built several small business sites in Ruby on Rails. This process lead him to create mTools, a closed source content management system used for consulting. After four years of using mTools for real world consulting, Resolve Digital decided to rename the project Refinery CMS and make it open source in 2009. Resolve Digital took a commercial, closed source project with a four year investment and made it free and open source to the Ruby on Rails community. Since open sourcing the project, it has become the second most popular Rails CMS.


Finalists - People's Choice Award

Winner: Amie McCarron
Amie worked for nine months to build three websites for Alcoholics Anonymous using a single open source CMS. This project was funded only by AA member contributions and therefore had a very limited budget, but by using free and open source software, along with a large amount of pro-bono effort, the new websites were successfully launched this year.

Lianne Dalziel
As a Member of Parliament and the Chair of the Commerce Select Committee, Lianne Dalziel worked to update the Patents Bill to exclude computer software as being patentable.

DaviCal
DAViCal is an open source CalDav server built on a Postgres database, bringing open source, standards-compliant, cross-platform group calendaring to the world. DAViCal is the glue that makes cross-platform calendar sharing happen. Built by just one person, Andrew McMillan, this tool has helped many organisations, large and small.

Mark Osborne
Mark's decision to go against the prevailing wisdom in schools and to promote open systems and software was unprecedented in New Zealand Schools and is paving the way for other schools to move away from proprietary standards and software.

The Tumanako Project
Philip Court has developed an all-electric, full-scale racing car. After examining the options, he decided to make it an open source project to encourage interoperability and general usefulness. This spawned Tumanako, which is now producing components for several different high-power electric motor and battery applications.

NZOSS Public Sector Remix
The Public Sector Remix was launched in August 2009. It involved 14 government agencies and was facilitated by NZOSS as a project to demonstrate the viability of free open source software on public sector desktops.

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