Since we're very close to the WUC now, I thought it was about time that I shared the list of nominees for the Contributor of the Year (CotY) and Colin Kuskie Award (CKA) for community excellence.

Just as a reminder the CKA is given out usually for volunteerism, and overall dedication to the WebGUI community. It is more based upon community spirit than raw contributions. Whereas CotY is based upon raw contributions and is therefore usually only given out to organizations rather than individuals.

The nominees for CKA are as follows:

Bernd Kalbfuß-Zimmermann & Klaus Hertle for their tireless effort at spreading WebGUI in the German speaking world and the massive effort they put behind the German translation.

Ernesto Hernandez-Novich for his continued effort on getting WebGUI into the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Ernesto won CKA last year and his efforts are no less staggering this year.

Wes Morgan for his countless patches to both WebGUI and the WRE.

Lauralyn Ninow for her tireless bug reports and community involvement through forums and IRC. No one submits more bug reports than she does, and knowing that there is a bug is half the battle.

Graham Knop for his WebGUI Dev (wgd). Technically Graham isn't eligible for this award because he works for Plain Black, but he build this utility mostly on his free time, and it is now used by all the core developers and contributors. For that he deserves at least an honorable mention even though he can't actually receive the award.

The Template Working Group for the zenification of the WebGUI template system. The Template Working Group is made up of volunteers from several different organizations in the WebGUI community, and they've put in hundreds of hours making the templates much more modifiable via CSS in 7.7, and their efforts continue.

The nominees for CotY are:

perlDreamer Consulting for tireless advocacy and community help in IRC, not to mention additional tests, bug fixes, and feature enhancements.

SDH Consulting Group for the dozens of contributions this year including, but not limited to File Pump, Survey enhancements, the Carousel asset, and Passive Analytics.

ProcoliX for being the most active member in the translation community, for lots of bug reports and RFEs, and for the massive amount of effort they put into the WRE.

Pluton for the pile of templates they've contributed to the Bazaar.

Oqapi for the vendor payments system in the shop, the ogone payment gateway, template working group, and other contributions.

United Knowledge for continued work on the UK Player and the leadership role they took in the Template Working group.

Knowmad Technologies for the active involvement in the wiki, bug reports, RFEs, template working group, and irc.

SwiftySite for sponsoring the WUC to allow us to offer tickets to the community for $100 less than we could ourselves, and backporting features that they created for themselves such as the version tag mode selection system.

As always, the winners will be announced at the WUC. See you there!