As IndiaFOSS 3.0 Conference draws closer we would like to remind you that the Nominations for FOSS Awards will be closing on 14th October, 2023. This is your final chance to recognize and honor the individuals, projects, and organizations that have made awesome contributions into the realm of Free and Open Source Software.
After the applications are closed, we will begin with the Community Voting on forum from 15th Oct, 2023 to 21st October, 2023. To participate in community voting, please sign-up for the FOSS United Forum by 15th October 2023.
All the winners of the FOSS Awards will be IndiaFOSS 3.0 for receiving the awards. So, hurry up and nominate your favorite projects, maintainers, and organizations for the FOSS Awards.
Consider / nominate / prioritise contributions from the past year (over lifetime contributions).
Keep fewer categories (maybe just best project, best contributor)
Ensure all popular projects / contributors are nominated even if they don’t show up. It’s better to ensure high quality of the awards than choosing from a narrow set of nominations.
We have worked on making the nomination set broader, building up on the feedback from last time, and here’s the outline of the procedure along with deadlines we aim to adhere to. We’d love your inputs and will proceed with the plan with the go-ahead.
Award Categories:
Best FOSS Project
Outstanding Contributor (Male)
Outstanding Contributor (Female)
Rising Star
Best FOSS Community Initiative
FOSS in Government
Process:
Mostly same as before, some key points:
People can nominate others for the award on the portal, and if they share their email with us, we’ll keep them posted about their nomination’s progress. Their records will be deleted post voting.
The person nominating someone can also enumerate on their contributions and also provide context on why their contribution is meaningful.
Every nominee will get an email once they are nominated for the award by someone.
Once the nomination closes, the jury will select the final candidates, for which the community can vote on the forum.
Timeline
23rd Dec 2023: Nominations Open
25th January 2024: Jury conveys the finalists. (Edit + discussion pending)
31st January 2024 23:59 IST: Nominations Close
10th February 2024: Voting closes at 23:59 IST
Please post your comments and suggestions!
We’d love to implement changes that level up the discourse and quality of the process!
Taking into account the suggestions so far by @Venkatesh_Hariharan and @MV_Karan, here are the key takeaways:
→ The deadline for nominations will be until end of January.
→ Registrations for FOSS Awards will be live throughout, and we won’t be stopping new registrations in any case, so that if anyone who finds about voting even on the last day can still sign up and vote.
→ We have to finalise the weightage of jury and community voting. As of now, the jury serves as a filter to select a handful of candidates from the nominations which will be voted upon. In line with our current plan, all nominations will not be voted upon, but I believe we should reconsider this and come up with a more rounded strategy. Regardless of whether we change the process or keep it unaltered, we must have strong reasons as to why it is the way it is.
→ The nomination form will have space to enumerate on the work of the person who’s being nominated so the decision makers and voters can have crucial context.
How do we intend to communicate to the community that the submission/registration is available until end of January?
Are we going to post once a week via social media handles?
Will we request all city chapters to highlight this before, during, and at the end of monthly meetups?
Will we reach out to our IndiaFOSS 3.0 (and previous) Community Partners and request them to share this via their social media/circle?
Will we reach out to IndiaFOSS 3.0 sponsors and FOSS United Industry Partners and request them to share this internally?
?
Note that this is a great opportunity to discover and promote FOSS projects and people from India so we should seriously think about our outreach plans.
I gave an answer/opinion disguised as a question. Apologies.
The only solution for this is to keep pushing the announcements that FOSS Awards nominations are open and not give an ending date until
We are forwarding things to the jury.
The awards close in 15 days.
Yes, and if we don’t, we plan on having a posting schedule and utilise cross-posting on platforms to give us more reach. Not just simple posts, but other types of content such as short form if it is feasible, as it generally gets higher reach.
We should reach out to anyone and everyone, your suggestion to tap into existing FOSS United network makes perfect sense.
We should be sharing about this in the handles and share a newsletter - that nominations are open again, and maintain an programme for sharing and outreach.
Since the nominations are going to be open for a lot longer until the awards are closed, we will announce the nominations open and start the publicity around it max by this weekend i.e. 23rd Dec 2023, Saturday.
You can check out how we do it in the ERPNext community. I think community voting would be the best (we can restrict it to members who have certain Karma in the forum).
I found the previous model of taking in nominations first and then finalising the candidates after a round of filtering by the jury to be better.
This might create problems if we have new submissions coming in while the discussions among the jury members are happening. There is no weightage as such between the two processes but I do feel the need of having some sort of filter for all the nominations that come through.
