Sourcefabric End of Year Awards 2012
So, here it is... the moment none of you have been waiting for. Sourcefabric's inaugural End of Year Awards 2012.
Last week we asked our team and community to let you know what rocked their world this year. Absolutely no science in how we put this together, and it's just for some harmless fun (so all complaints to be sent in on a postcard to the usual address). We looked for clear winners in terms of votes and, where we couldn't find one, we consulted a ouija board.
News website, publication or organisation of the year
Hugely varied set of nominations here meant lots of usual suspects could have won the title, but in the hat a great mixture of the big names, some innovative individuals, some platforms and some vital, less-famous organisations.
In terms of the big guns, Gawker, BBC, Zeit Online and the Huffington Post all featured. Perhaps owing to the paradigm shifts in how news is delivered, Facebook and Twitter received votes, plus Wikipedia. Georgia's NetGazeti and Senegal's West Africa Democracy Radio were also in the running.
But, for the sake of the underdog, we put this to a jury who discarded the big hitters and picked out three joint winners (don't you just love inventing rules to break them?). And here they are...
Joint winners: Mother Jones, Wikinews and FiveThirtyEight.
News app of the year
Two clear winners here. Honorable mentions go to the Guardian, NPR, Overview, Zite and Voddio. There were plenty of mentions for various services, but if they didn't have a dedicated app, they didn't get in. So, without further ado, the two winners are...
Winner: Twitter
Runner-up: Pulse
Open source software or project of the year
We disqualified Sourcefabric projects from nomination here to keep it a little more interesting. Close this one, but one clear winner and two runners-up, with a lot of honorable mentions.
(As an aside, SoundCloud and Storify, while great, are not exactly open source. C'mon people...)
In the mix were Firefox, Ubuntu, Wordpress and Salt Stack, but the bragging rights go to...
Winner: Android
Runner-up: Webkit
Runner-up: Github (not open source itself, but as a resource, it's in!)
Programming language of the year
Always a divisive and fast-moving topic, but this category was the easiest to call. Props to the funny folks who nominated 'English'. CSS and PHP were in there, but the winners are...
Winner: Python
Runner-up: Javascript
Device of the year
Perhaps too vague this category. If this was a hat-tip to device maker of the year, rather than pure device, then HTC would have won hands down. Not everyone added the exact model in the series, so we've tried to group them. In this wholly unscientific manner, we proclaim the award goes to...
Winner: iPad
Runner-up: Samsung Galaxy III
Runner-up: HTC One
E-reader of the year
One brand dominating all others in this field, though the votes were close on a clear winner for the exact model. Interesting though... does this reflect the strength of the shop rather than the hardware? Nook was in the mix, Kobo featured, but this was a whitewash...
Winner: Amazon Kindle
Runner-up: Amazon Kindle Fire
Nonprofit of the year
Lot's of crossover here with the above of course, but spreads the net a little wider. Usual suspects featured on the nominations list. Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica, Wikipedia all in there, but there can be only one (and, er, a runner up).
Winner: Mozilla Foundation
Runner-up: Wikileaks
Open source organisation of the year
Again, we discarded nominations for ourselves, because, well, it's just not cricket (and there's one category for that later). So, for an organisation's contribution to the world of open source, on behalf of our community, we give honorable mentions to Tor Project, The Document Foundation, Apache Foundation and Eclipse. But this had only one winner, and that is...
Winner: Mozilla Foundation
Sourcefabric project of the year
Controversial this one. We love all of our projects of course, but interested to see what the community and team have responded to best this year. It was very, very close and the runners-up would have to feature Superdesk, Airtime and Newscoop. Which leaves this year's community favourite as (drum roll)...
Winner: Booktype
So, that's that. Sure to spark excitement and fury the world over (or not), plus throw some added spice into our team video conferences, you can debate our findings to your heart's content over on the new #newsbeta Google+ page. Thanks to all those that voted. Judges decision is final. This does not reflect the opinions of my employer. Retweets are not endorsements. Normal terms and conditions apply. Eat your greens.