Voting is now open for 2019 Women in Open Source Awards

The nominations are in, finalists have been chosen and voting is now open for the 2019 Women in Open Source Awards!

In its fifth year, the Women in Open Source Awards were created and are sponsored by Red Hat to honor women who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or those making innovative use of open source methodology.

The finalists in the community category represent women who work or volunteer on open source projects. This year's finalists are:

• Hong Phuc Dang, co-founder of FOSSASIA, a community devoted to improving people’s lives through sharing open technologies and knowledge, and fostering global connections. As an open source contributor for 11 years, Dang actively works to develop and sustain a number of open source projects, including SUSI.AI, the open source voice assistant framework, Pocket Science Lab, a miniaturized FOSS hardware and software laboratory, and Eventyay, an open source event solution. Every year she also organizes the FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit in Singapore, which invites open source contributors from around the world get together to share, collaborate, and build a bridge between the East and West.

• Gabriela de Queiroz, founder of R-Ladies, a worldwide organization that promotes gender diversity in the R community with more than 38,000 participants in across 135 cities and 44 countries. The idea for R-Ladies came about because she wanted to help others by creating a place where they could feel safe and without judgment. She saw the open source programming language, R, as a way to teach and empower others. In 2018, R-Ladies became an R Consortium top-level project. After six years working in the open source community, de Queiroz was the first Latinx to be elected as an R foundation ordinary member, and founded the R Consortium Community Diversity & Inclusion Working Group. She also presented at many conferences including Open Source Summit and the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

• Limor Fried, founder and lead engineer at Adafruit Industries, an open source hardware company designed to be a place for people to learn about and purchase the open tools, equipment and electronics online. Adafruit has grown to more than 100 employees and is 100 percent woman owned. Fried personally selects, tests and approves each product before it is added to the Adafruit store. With more than 13 years in the open source community, she is a strong advocate for open source hardware and software. She led the effort in writing open source tutorials at learn.adafruit.com, providing more than 1,700 designs for makers to build and learn from, developed Circuit Playground Express - an all-in-one exploratory circuit board widely adopted in schools, colleges, and STEM organizations - and hosts the YouTube show "Ask an Engineer," one of the longest-running live weekly Internet show on STEM and "Show and tell," allowing makers to share their creations.

• Nithya Ruff, head of Comcast’s open source practice, began her journey in 1998 when a previous employer started to get involved in open source and she was part of the group tasked with figuring out the strategy. Since then, she has gone on to found two open source program offices (OSPOs), and acts as an educator and mentor to new OSPOs. Ruff also serves on the steering committee for the TODO Group, serves as a champion for the Chasing Grace project, built the diversity agenda for the Open Source Summits in North America and Europe, and sits on the board of CodeChix. Ruff is a mentor to many young engineers and advocates through her work to make technology companies and projects inclusive of all contributors and contributions.

• Pia Mancini, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Open Collective, which is focused on enabling open source projects to transparently raise funds while continuing as distributed collaborative communities. As part of the mission, she also created DemocracyOS, an open source platform for civic engagement, and DemocracyEarth, an open source political party designed to be replicated by people around the world. With more than 12 years of experience in the open source community, Mancini also co-founded SustainOSS, a one-day event for multiple and diverse stakeholders of the open source community from all over the world.

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:

• Sayantika Banik, a student at Sir M. Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree. She has been an open source contributor for three years, including work on Google Developer Group, Women Techmakers and Terrain Smart Safety System (TSSS). Banik received a 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration India student scholarship, and worked on the team that ran DevFest 2018 Bangalore, one of the biggest community-led developer events in India that year.​

• Kate Compton, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her open source involvement began in 2014, when she created the Tracery library and language, and open sourced it. Compton also produces a regular feed of artificial intelligence (AI)-is-for-everyone tutorials and AI starter projects, and successfully shipped a Kickstarter-funded card deck (open source and creative commons) for designing generative art.

• Saloni Garg, a student at the LNM Institute of Information Technology where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Open source user and contributor for almost three years, she is an active participant in a number of diversity initiatives, including Women Techmakers Group, 1 Million Women to Tech, Anita Borg and Women-Who-Code. Garg was selected as a Mozilla Open Leader in 2018, and contributes regularly to Wikimedia, GNOME and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), with a focus on making their communities more diverse and accessible to all.

• Mallory Gaspard, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics. As a disabled individual who uses a mobility scooter, her physical needs coupled with her passion for STEM led her to join Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS) where she developed the Automatic Door Control Project and a low-cost Raspberry Pi-based Bluetooth device that can be retrofitted onto existing automatic door opening equipment.

• Alina Matyukhina, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Brunswick and cybersecurity researcher at the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, where she is working to develop a way to protect the identity of open source software developers. Matyukhina has been an open source contributor for four years, and has developed a technique based on AI which is able to hide and anonymize the coding style of open source developers.

Finalists were selected by a panel of Red Hat judges and past winners including: DeLisa Alexander, executive vice president and chief people officer; Tim Cramer, vice president, software engineering; Margaret Dawson, vice president, product marketing; Denise Dumas, vice president, software engineering; Mary Oakley, senior director, sales; Clare Grant, director, product management; Paul Frields, senior manager, software engineering; Leslie Hawthorn, senior principal program manager; Tom Callaway, technical and community outreach program manager; Vincent Batts, principal software engineer; Priyanka Nag, technical writer; Rikki Endsley, Opensource.com community manager, Harish Pillay, senior community relations specialist; and Dana Lewis, 2018 Women in Open Source Community Award winner.

Voting for the winners is open and ends at 5 pm ET on Feb. 25, 2019. Voting is open to the public and individuals are allowed one vote. Winners will be announced at Red Hat Summit 2019, taking place May 7-9 in Boston.

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