Hiya everyone I really appreciate the desire to recognise great efforts in the community. I'm gonna be that person who asks 'is an award really a thing to start up in 2023'? My next line of thought is 'is this sustainable for a small-ish volunteer community? who is going to look after this in 5 years or even 2 years time?'
There's already been a short discussion about how awards get skewed (starting at [1], particularly well expressed in [2]). Effort sustainability is additional concern. In a related discussion in another forum I wondered if, instead of awards, a whole conference could be devoted to community building and celebration of each others' acheivements. One way to implement that might be to only accept talks where a team presents about a project, software, a map, a team who inspires them - which is not their own (or from the same company). And/or teams set up to discuss community and cultural parts of being an open source geospatial participant. Its a way of our community recognising others, and a way of doing work to sustain itself. This is a fairly audacious departure from what (especially in Australia) a mapping and technology conference is evolving into, it might also be audacious enough to work. A program committee will likely have a lot of work to do in ensuring small-yet-critical projects - the one proposal that wants to talk about proj, and the other one about geos, versus 4326 about QGIS and another 28355 about whatever the hot new tech of the year is. Maybe just another too-far-out-there idea, maybe food for thought. Cheers, Adam [1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oceania/2023-March/002822.html [2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oceania/2023-March/002827.html -- Dr Adam Steer https://iamadamsteer.com _______________________________________________ Oceania mailing list Oceania@lists.osgeo.org https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/oceania