Last night, FedScoop held its FedScoop 50 Awards Reception in Washington, D.C. to celebrate, honor and recognize the achievements of 50 of the federal IT community’s brightest minds and innovators of 2012. We’re proud to share that Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist for Red Hat’s U.S. public sector group, won FedScoop’s Industry Leadership Award!

FedScoop selected finalists for each of its categories, including Federal Leadership Award, IT Programs of the Year, Innovations of the Year, FedMentors of the Year, Golden Gov: Federal Executive of the Year and Up and Comers. Winners were selected after public voting over a two-week period. Gunnar won FedScoop’s Industry Leadership Award alongside a who’s who list of public sector IT executives from Amazon Web Services, HP, Microsoft, NetApp, and Symantec.

At Red Hat, Gunnar works with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software. The FedScoop 50 award is a testament to Gunnar’s passion for improving government IT and collaboration. He would tell you that he perks up when people talk about cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model. His dedication and advocacy for open source solutions are evidenced by his deep commitment to a number of organizations, including Open Source for America, Military Open Source working group, SIIA Software Division (and its Public Sector Innovation Group), Freedom2Connect Technical Council and CivicCommons.

Congratulations to Gunnar on the FedScoop 50 honor!

For more details about the FedScoop 50, visit http://fedscoop.com/events/fedscoop50.