This post complements Henrik’s Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards.
Recap: we keep the tradition of awarding MySQL community members for their notable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem.
Previously, the awards were given by MySQL AB/Sun. Later on they were given by the community itself, as will follow this year, when the awards are presented during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, this April.
Henrik describes in details the three categories: community contributor, application, corporate contributer -of the year.
A bit more about the categories
To add to Henrik’s description of the categories, keep in mind the following:
- Community member would be a person. That person could be working by himself/herself, or can be part of some corporate. It does not matter. What matters is the person’s contribution.
- Application: some code or project which either enhance/complement MySQL (e.g. Replication/HA solution) or uses MySQL. In the latter case, it is important that MySQL role’s in the application is significant. For example, some popular site built with some CMS using MySQL may not qualify, if it could run just the same with PostgreSQL or other databases, or if the owners are not actually aware or at all mindful about the specific database technology they are using.
- Corporate: we’re still figuring this one out. The general idea is to acknowledge a corporate which, some way or the other, did a good thing to the MySQL ecosystem or the community.
A bit more about the nomination and voting process
Anyone can nominate anyone! Please send your nominations by mail to mysql.awards [at] gmail.com. Please specify who/which your nominee is, in which category, and why. Kindly include disclosure of relationship with nominee (this does not disqualify, we just want to have everything in the open), if applicable.
At this stage we are just collecting as many names as we can, so please keep these coming!
When all names are collected we open a discussion between voting committee members, followed by a poll on each category.
Traditionally, there have been three winners in each category. This is no longer the case, and has not been as such in the previous two years. Now, there are no strict rules to that; we go with the flow. If there just aren’t enough votes for some nominee, we may choose not to award said nominee. So, if two nominees get a high number, say 5 votes each, from the community, and the next one only gets one vote, then we will probably only award the two. This is roughly what happened last year.
I say “there are no rules” because we follow our common sense and the insights provided by the various members of the panel.
A bit more about the people involved
The voting panel is comprised of winners from previous two years, in addition to the conference’s chairman and chairwoman. I think the list of people involved is diverse and balanced.
Henrik and myself are secretaries, which means we manage the discussion board and the voting process and participate in the discussions, without voting ourselves. We kinda just took the position to ourselves, it looks great on our resume. We can later apply for secretary jobs anywhere we like.
So as you can understand, this whole thing is just a community effort to keep up a good tradition. There are no written standards or guidelines, just the common sense, goodwill and etiquette of the people involved.
I like the ending! I need to put this on my resume now 🙂
Hi Shlomi, I was wondering if you know anything about such third-party cloud database services like
this one. If you had something similar, could this be nominated in one of the categories?Would appreciate your professional opinion. Thanks!
Dear Valerie,
Out of respect to the company you were trying to promote here, I’ve removed the link to their website.
Kindly note the “Kindly include disclosure of relationship with nominee” message in the text.
Apparently you’re an avid “user” of said product, and tend to post “innocent” questions in multiple places about their products.
The thing is, sure, they could be included in one of the categories. But your attempt for SEO is too blunt.
Normally I would delete a comment such as yours altogether; but I decided to answer up front. And commenting like that for this particular post is completely out of place.
I don’t see that you should be using my blog to secretly-aggressively promote your company. I say this as I’ve met with several of its employees on good terms. Kindly refrain from doing so in the future.