The shortlist for the UK Open Source Awards has been revealed, with 16 contenders across four categories.

This list had been whittled down from 65 nominations – a record in the award show’s 10 year history.

The UK Open Source Awards is a non-profit event celebrating significant contributions made by participants in the UK to Open Source technology.

This free to attend, not for profit event, organised by SalesAgility and Trustable, will see technology and open source leaders gather to exchange knowledge, discuss open source trends and the impact of open source on the wider technology landscape. The four award category winners will be announced at the event hosted at University of Edinburgh Informatics forum on 12th June 2019.

The 16 nominees who have made the short list are:

Individual – for outstanding contributions to open source:
◦ Mandy Chessell
◦ Simon McVittie
◦ James Morgan
◦ Tracy Miranda

Company – for outstanding contribution to open source either through product development or contributions to projects:
◦ Cloudsoft Corp.
◦ Open Healthcare
◦ AB EHR
◦ Outlier Ventures

Public Sector and Third Sector – for an outstanding open source project in the UK public sector or third sector:
◦ Ripple Foundation
◦ The Apperta Foundation
◦ Inside Outcomes CIC
◦ NHS Digital

Student – a cash stipend of £1,500 will be awarded for an outstanding contribution
to open source from a currently matriculated UK student:
◦ Antreas Antoniou (University of Edinburgh – School of Informatics)
◦ Andrew Brock (University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt – Edinburgh Centre For
Robotics)
◦ Nathan Hughes – (Aberystwyth University)
◦ Yiannis Simillides – (Imperial College London)

The independent judging panel is made up of Open Source luminaries Allison Randal, Jonathan Riddell and Dawn Foster.

Foster, who has a Phd in contribution to the Linux Kernel, said: “Many of the student projects contain impressive research and using open source ensures that this work can be easily used by future researchers and students.”

Randal added: “I was impressed by the number of nominations based around helping the NHS, the entrepreneurial spirit working for the public good using open methods is exactly what we were after.”

Head Judge Jonathan Riddell, of the KDE community, said: “We had four impressive lists of nominations to whittle down to the shortlists. It took us a good week of deliberations to pick some truly spectacular projects and we had to by-pass some very worthy candidates but these do represent a beautiful spread of the state of the art.”

This awards event includes some of Open Source’s best international speakers including Stephen Walli, principal program manager at Microsoft, and Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network.

The evening ceremony will be keynoted by Nextcloud’s founder and CEO, Frank Karlitschek, after which the four awards will be presented to outstanding individuals and organisations contributing to Open Source in the UK.

You can sign up for a free ticket at opensourceawards.org and read more about the short-list here.