2016 New Zealand Open source Awards celebrate thriving technical sector

The 2016 New Zealand Open source Awards were announced this week, recognising the country's most promising open source contributors and projects over the past two years.

The awards also showcased the benefits of open source technology, which has been used to leverage competitive advantage in the business sector, as well as leadership in the public sector.

"This is an impressive list of New Zealand's Open source community, and it represents a cross-section of what is a thriving technical, social and creative sector. The calibre of the nominations meant that there were strong contenders in every category. And while all of the finalists were worthy of recognition, the judges unanimously agreed that the winners in each category were those most deserving of recognition for their contributions", explains Jason Ryan, judging panel chair.

Government: Digital NZ, a platform that helps users find, share and use digital content about New Zealand

Business: Catalyst for the Catalyst Cloud, New Zealand's only cloud infrastructure fully driven by APIs.

Education, Social Services and Youth: Wellington City Council for its City Housing Computer Hubs, which are open source computing hubs for council tenants.

Arts: Massey University's Make/Use team and project: User Modifiable Zero Waste Fashion, which incorporates an open source system for making garments with zero waste.

Science: The Cacophony Project, which applies IT tools to pest eradication of possums, rats and stoats.

Open source Project: Paul Campbell's OneRNG Project, a random data generator that improves the quality of security operations, including encryption.

Open source Contributor: Eileen McNaughton for her contribution to CiviCRM, a constituent relationship management programme for not-for-profits.

People's Choice: Brent Wood for his services to geospatial open source; the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for its Priv-O-Matic, a privacy statement generator.

Special Award: Michael Kerrisk for his work on the Linux Man Pages Project, which documents Linux kernel and C library interfaces.

The University of Auckland's Department of Computer Science Clinton Bedogni Prize for Open Systems: Peter Gutmann.