We did something a little different this year with Contributor of the Year (CotY). First, we split it into two awards, one for individuals and one for organizations. Second, we recognized the efforts of everyone, not just the winners.

This year's organizational winner contributed to the Windows WRE, posted wiki entries, fixed bugs, contributed patches for SQL Form, created many templates and other uploads for the community to download, and helped out in IRC and the forums. In general, they churned out a lot of work for the community. This organization is Knowmad Technologies, a small WebGUI integrator from North Carolina.

The individual CotY winner did some bug fixing, increased standards compliance, and occasionally hung out in IRC. But his big contribution is so big it's immeasurable; especially when you consider that until spring of 2008 no one in the community (myself included) had ever heard of Ernesto Hernandez-Novich. Ernesto's feat is that he single handedly got WebGUI listed in the next release of Debian. It may not sink in just how big that is, but it potentially opens up millions of new users to WebGUI and allows them to install it by typing nothing more than "apt-get install webgui".

Ernesto couldn't join us at the WUC, so he sent a little video expressing his thanks.

But the news doesn't end there. Ernesto edged out someone that's familiar to pretty much anybody who's been around the WebGUI community in the past few years. His name is Colin Kuskie (aka perlDreamer). Colin is a two time winner of CotY and was well on his way to winning it a third time until Ernesto edged him out. So to reward all the work he's put in over the years, we've decided to rename the individual contributor of the year award to the Colin Kuskie award.