[NGO] FW: CitizenSpeak and George Hotelling Wins Public Interest Award

[Jon Stahl]

FYI... thought you all might find this inspiring and motivating.
 
best,
jon

________________________________

From: nten-discuss at groups.nten.org [mailto:nten-discuss at groups.nten.org]
On Behalf Of Katrin Verclas
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 11:51 AM
To: nten-discuss at groups.nten.org
Subject: [NTEN Discuss] CitizenSpeak and George Hotelling Wins Public
Interest Award



George Hotelling Named First Annual Winner of the New $10,000 Pizzigati
Prize 

San Francisco, CA, September 25, 2006 -Tides Foundation today announced
that the inaugural $10,000 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the
Public Interest will go to George Hotelling for his development work on
CitizenSpeak - a free email advocacy service for grassroots
organizations and an open source module on the Drupal content management
system. 


"This award is really an honor for me," said Hotelling.  "I'm extremely
proud to be considered in the same light as the other finalists and in
remembrance of Tony Pizzigati.  This award highlights the importance of
public space software and how it is helping grassroots organizations and
individual activists get their voices heard."


The new Pizzigati Prize - a project launched by Tides Foundation's
Florence and Frances Family Fund - aims to honor individuals who, in the
spirit of open source computing, fashion outstanding applications that
help nonprofits become more effective in their ongoing efforts for
social change. 


"Our judges faced a difficult choice," notes Jason Sanders, the Tides
Foundation philanthropic advisor who coordinates the Pizzigati Prize.
"Each of the six finalists for our first prize has made a valuable
contribution to public interest computing."


Hotelling's work on the CitizenSpeak project began when he realized that
local groups needed a tool that could help them impact local decisions
and decision-makers. He soon discovered that CitizenSpeak.org, a free
online service founded in 2002 by Jo Lee and Pablo Calamera, shared the
same vision. Hotelling, with over a decade of experience working with
open source tools rebuilt CitizenSpeak and made the code available as an
open source software. 


Community groups have been putting the revamped CitizenSpeak to work in
a wide range of campaigns, everything from a Rhode Island effort to stop
the siting of new schools on contaminated land to a multi-denominational
offensive against religious intolerance in the Delaware town of Indian
River. 


The code which George Hotelling developed that runs CitizenSpeak is
available as a free and open source Drupal module at
http://drupal.org/node/32189. The module has been used by domestic and
international organizations to educate their constituencies and promote
their causes in a number of countries around the world.


The finalists for the Pizzigati Prize included: 
* Zachary Rosen, the moving force behind CivicSpace, an open-source
community Web application geared towards non-profits that provides tools
for managing a contact database, building community, organizing events,
and much more. 
* Donald Lobo, the developer of CiviCRM, the first open source and
freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution.
* Kevin Smith, the leader of the development team for Martus, a free
open source software tool developed to enable social justice
organizations to safely document the sensitive information they collect
on human rights violations.
* Ethan McCutchen, the creator of WagN, a deep integration of wikis and
tagging that helps users of all computing abilities develop data
structures as they add content to their Web sites. 
* Jamie McClelland, the developer of Basebuilder, a simple-to-use
framework for designing organizational databases for community
organizers. 

About the Pizzigati Prize 
The Pizzigati Prize honors the brief life of Tony Pizzigati, an early
advocate of open source computing who spent his college years at the
Massachusetts Institute for Technology, working at the MIT Media Lab and
later the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Three years after his
1992 graduation, Pizzigati, then 24, died in an auto accident.  For more
information about the Pizzigati Prize, please visit:
www.pizzigatiprize.org <http://www.pizzigatiprize.org/> . 


About CitizenSpeak
CitizenSpeak is a non-profit that provides grassroots organizations and
local activists with an easy-to-use, powerful e-advocacy service. Since
its inception, CitizenSpeak has supported organizations from all across
the country, including formal organizations with long term goals, as
well as individuals using CitizenSpeak for one-time issue-oriented
actions.   The code that runs CitizenSpeak is available as a free and
open source Drupal module.  CitizenSpeak is based in Providence, RI.
For more information, please visit http://www.citizenspeak.org
<http://www.citizenspeak.org/> .
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