It’s time to nominate your favourite Julia contributor for the Julia Community Prize, 2020.
The prize will be announced at JuliaCon 2020 in July. Contributions can be in any area - code, packages, documentation, applications, or outreach. Contributions can also be for any time period. Winners will be given a citation and a cash award. Nominations are open till midnight Pacific time on Sunday, the 14th of June.
Note that previous winners are not eligible. You can nomnate as many people you want, including yourself.
I think the bar to get a community prize is pretty high so for someone to get it multiple years would be a true salute to how much they contribute to the community and wouldn’t limit new community prize winners in my opinion. The people I would vote for this year have already won it (and deserve to win it again).
If previous winners are not eligible, it means the new winners are potentially ranked 8th or below since there are 7 previous winners and the problem will get worse as years go by. I feel less good about voting if I need to select my 8th choice. Minor gripe, but there you go
I probably should have framed it affirmatively: I was super excited to nominate someone this year and immediately knew who it’d be. Even if everyone were eligible again, I’d still nominate them.
So any hint that they might not deserve to stand amongst prior winners or even that they’d even be second choices were everyone eligible again just really struck me the wrong way. The 2020 prize is definitely not the 2019 prize’s runners-up. That’s all.
I understand. And I know that anyone you vote for and anyone who wins will be highly deserving, but for ME… the only one I can speak for… my top 3-4 choices for this year have already won and are ineligible so in my case I am forced to vote for my 4th or 5th choice, which means I’m unlikely to vote. I don’t see the harm in letting past winners be considered again. That is all I am saying.
Being eligible to receive a prize only once is entirely standard for achievement awards. Many more people are deserving of a community prize for their work than awards are available in a given year. It makes sense that past winners should not be eligible again (for at least a few years). There is no absolute ladder of achievement here. The committee has to make a hard choice as to who to give a prize to given the limited number of slots. I understand that it’s disappointing that your top choice isn’t eligible, but consider it an opportunity to reward a contributor that you feel worthy of recognition, but may not have been awarded the prize yet.
