Those of us at CHNM would like to send a big thanks to our user and developer communities for all you have done to make Omeka an early success, and we’re pleased to announce that your contributions and enthusiasm have been recognized by a blue-ribbon commission of leading technologists with a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. In further recognition of the importance of community to the continued success of Omeka, prize money from the award will be allocated toward endowing year around user support for the project.
Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) awards recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. Members of the prize committee included Vinton Cerf, often called the “father of the internet” and chief internet evangelist at Google; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation; Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox Corp.; Ira Fuchs, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Donald J. Waters, program officer in the Program in Scholarly Communication at the Mellon Foundation. Committee members singled out Omeka for “involving an international collaborative community from the very beginning of the project.”
A special thanks to our friend Wally Grotophorst, who helpfully captured the full audio of Vint Cerf’s presentation of the award at the annual CNI Task Force Meeting in Washington, D.C.