Scotland's Open Source software community recently held its first independent Open Source Awards, recognizing the wealth of talented individuals and companies whose aim is to strengthen and develop the country's Open Source community.

Held at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh, the two principal categories - Open Source Student Award and Open Source Excellence Awards - demonstrated that Scotland punches above its weight in pioneering Open Source innovation. Both categories attracted a wealth of entries, with the judging panel eventually opting to present the Open Source Student Award to Arron Finnon, who studied Ethical Hacking and Counter Measures at the University of Abertay, Dundee.

Arron won the award for his Open Source Avocacy, including starting the Abertay University Linux User Group, involvement on the One Laptop Per Child project, including obtaining two of the One Laptop Per Child laptops and demonstrating the units to others around Scotland. Arron graduated this year and has recently become involved in the Scottish Linux Group.

Meanwhile, the Open Source Excellence Award went to Marcel Hecko, IT services manager and WiFi infrastructure project leader at the Station House Media Unit in Aberdeen.

The judges were impressed by the work carried out by Marcel and his team in setting up a grid WiFi network in Aberdeen and providing free Internet access to the disadvantaged Middlefield area of the city.

In this, Marcel has employed a range of Open Source tools, and has developed and released NagMap, a tool that integrates Google Maps with monitoring data, such as software Nagios and Smokeping, both well known and widely deployed Open Source network monitoring applications.

Greg Soper, from SalesAgility.com, organisers of the Open Source awards in Scotland commented;

"We've been delighted with the high level of entrants this year. It made the judging and selection process very hard which is no surprise given the meteoric rise of Open Source developments in recent years.

Until this year, the Open Source Awards had been a prominent category within the Scottish Software Awards umbrella, but the Open Source community felt there was a growing need to independently recognize the achievements made across the community in Scotland. Given the overwhelming success of this year's event, we are now looking forward to more success in 2010."

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---NOTES FOR THE EDITOR---

The Scottish Open Source Awards 2009 (SCOSA 2009), is organised by SalesAgility.com Ltd, a Scottish Open Source CRM Company. The object of the awards is to recognise and to reward those individuals and organisations in Scotland that are contributing to the growth of Open Source; to educate individuals and organisations about the benefits of using Open Source technologies; and to inspire students and young people about the creative potential of Open Source.

The Open Source Awards were sponsored by the following organisations:
Bright Purple Recruitment
Informatics Ventures
Nominet
SICSA
OSS-Watch
Acumen PR
ScotlandIS
Craneware

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