Red Hat announces voting open for 2018 Women in Open Source Awards

We're excited to announce that voting is now open for the 2018 Women in Open Source Awards. In its fourth year, the Women in Open Source Award seeks to honor women who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or make innovative use of open source technology.​
The finalists in the community category represent women who work or volunteer on open source projects. This year's finalists are:

• Rupa Dachere, founder and executive director of CodeChix, a grassroots non-profit targeting retention of women engineers in the industry through open source technical and cultural advocacy programs. As an open source contributor for more than 20 years, including work on PiDoorbell and CodeChix Technical Curriculums, she grew CodeChix into an active community of 400+ women engineers in the Bay Area. In addition, Rupa founded and grew DevPulseCon, a unique, hyper-technical micro conference for women engineers in industry and academia, from 80 women engineers in 2015 to 300 attendees in three years with an international representation.

• Beth “pidge” Flanagan, chief technology officer of Togán Labs, a women-led open source tech startup in Ireland, and one of the first five OpenChain partners. It has a mission to build a robust Linux platform for IoT applications, and to do so while creating and maintaining a diverse workforce. Contributing to open source for more than 20 years, she has worked in a variety of projects including OpenEmbedded/Yocto, Oryx Linux, OpenChain, Open Source Applications Vol II and Open Source Entrepreneur Network.

• Dana Lewis, founder of the OpenAPS movement and creator of the DIY Artificial Pancreas System. OpenAPS is an open and transparent effort to make safe and effective basic Artificial Pancreas System (APS) technology available to help  improve and save lives and reduce the burden of Type 1 diabetes. In the past year, the OpenAPS community has grown worldwide, with 500+ people using various systems based off of Dana’s work and original system designs. An open source contributor for four years, she also facilitates research projects through the Nightscout Data Commons and the OpenAPS Data Commons, and has developed several open source tools to help encourage researchers to engage with the diabetes data sets, thus expediting their efforts.

• Katie McLaughlin, site reliability engineer at Divio and founder of KatieConf. An active participant in open source communities for five years, she is also senior apiarist with the BeeWare project, contributing her system administration and infrastructure knowledge as a core developer. Katie has served on the Linux Australia council, the Open Source Developer’s Club and is currently a director of the Django Software Foundation. In addition, she is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world, including a keynote at 2017 PyCon AU and a keynote at the 2017 Community Leadership Summit.

• Karen Sandler, cyborg lawyer, is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. With more than twelve years in free and open source software, she has worked across a number of organizations including the GNOME Foundation, where she expanded Outreachy to communities beyond GNOME to include the Linux kernel, Wikimedia, Mozilla and Debian. At the Conservancy, she leads a team that provides support for growing free software projects, fosters new initiatives to strengthen the global movement and assists in copyleft enforcement. She has helped to grow the community of Conservancy projects to 46.

The finalists in the academic category represent women who are full-time students currently enrolled in a college or university. This year's finalists include:

• Jona Azizaj, a student at the University of Tirana, Faculty of Economics, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business informatics. Jona has been an open source contributor for more than three years, including work on Fedora, LibreOffice, and Nextcloud, and as a member of Open Labs Hackerspace in Tirana, Albania. Jona is also one of the founding members of Open Source Diversity, a core member of the Fedora Diversity team and co-founder of LibreLadies.

• Ann Barcomb, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Limerick who has a research focus on free and open source software communities. Open source user and contributor for almost 24 years, she started contributing to Perl while working as a programmer, focusing on community work like organizing conferences, speaking, and summarizing mailing lists. In addition to programming during her day job, Ann contributes through community-focused work, like organizing conferences, speaking, and summarizing mailing lists.

• Zui Dighe, a student at Duke University, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and computer science. Zui has been an open source contributor for two and a half years, including work on SANA, Particle and Arduino. As a NAE Grand Challenge Scholar, Zui is creating an open source IoT device that tracks vaccine carriers in developing nations. Zui also recently placed third in Schneider Electric’s International Energy Access Competition with a cloud data analytics solution to survey and monitor energy opportunities in rural communities.

• Emily Shannon, a student at Duke University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering. An open source contributor for two years, Emily serves as president of Duke eNable, a group that uses open source designs and 3D printing to create recreational prosthetics for amputees, free of cost.

• Nikki Stevens, a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, focusing her research on software engineering ethics and increasing technological equity. Nikki has been a contributor to the open source community for more than 18 years, working in Drupal, Open Demographics Initiative, iMentor and Mozilla.

Finalists were selected by a panel of Red Hat judges and past winners including: DeLisa Alexander, executive vice president and chief people officer; Matt Hicks, senior vice president, software engineering; Denise Dumas, vice president, software engineering; Clare Grant, director, product management; Adinarayana Sakala, director, software engineering; Harish Pillay, senior community relations specialist; Stormy Peters, senior manager, community leads; Diane Mueller, director, community development; Jessica McKellar, founder and chief technology officer, Pilot and 2016 Women in Open Source Community Award winner; and Avni Khatri, president, Kids on Computers and 2017 Women in Open Source Community Award winner.
Voting for the winners is open and ends Feb. 21, 2018. Voting is open to the public, individuals are allowed one vote per email address. Winners will be announced at Red Hat Summit 2018, taking place May 8-10 in San Francisco.

To read more about each finalist and cast your vote, visit redhat.com/womeninopensource.