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The GitHub Awards celebrates the outstanding contributions and achievements in the developer community by honoring individuals, projects, and organizations for creating an outsized positive impact on the community.
We announced these awards live at GitHub Universe 2024, but here’s a recap for those who missed it!
Open Source Awards
Wonderfully Welcoming Award
Home Assistant is an open source home automation tool–think light bulbs, thermostats, and more–that has an incredibly engaged global community of self-described tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. It integrates with tons of different devices and services and processes your data locally. *(It’s true: a handful of Raspberry Pis running in a guest bedroom can automate, seemingly, your entire house!) *Home Assistant has been the top open source project by contributors in our annual Octoverse report for two years running and this year claimed the second spot for attracting the most first-time contributors. Wonderfully Welcoming, indeed!
💡 Did you know: Home Assistant was ranked the 2nd top open source project by contributors on GitHub on this year’s Octoverse report.
The Wonderfully Welcoming Award recognizes people or projects that have been the most welcoming and seen an increasing amount of contributors.
Noteworthy Newcomer Award
Abi Raja’s project, screenshot-to-code works exactly as advertised. This innovative tool leverages AI to convert screenshots, mockups and even Figma designs into functional front-end code (HTML, Tailwind, React, Vue, and more). It helps developers prototype faster and bring their designs to life with minimal manual effort.
The Noteworthy Newcomer Award recognizes people or projects that are creating and sharing breakthrough contributions/projects.
Global Grandiose Award
Congratulations to GatsbyJS, the winner of the Global Grandiose Award! 🎉 With over 4,000 contributors from 112 countries, GatsbyJS has built a truly global and diverse community. Its powerful, React-based framework enables developers everywhere to create fast, high-performance websites.
The Global Grandiose Award recognizes projects that have a large global community of contributors.
Awesome AI Award
Everyone’s talking about AI, so we’ve added the Awesome AI Award this year to recognize an open source AI project that has a significant impact for developers (and an awfully cute logo). The inaugural winner is Ollama, which helps developers get up and running with large language models (LLMs). It rocketed into the top 10 open source projects in this year’s Octoverse report as the fastest-growing project by contributors. Get a load of these models and try it out today!
💡 Did you know: Ollama was the fastest-growing open source AI project in 2024 by contributor count.
The Awesome AI Award recognizes an open source AI project helping create significant impact to developers.
Supply Chain Sentinel Award
If you hang out in GitHub Security Lab’s Slack, go to security conferences, or generally keep up with the latest on CodeQL, you’ve probably come across Simon Gerst. He’s made noticeable contributions to the CodeQL practitioner community through the workshops he delivers at conferences and his activity in the Security Lab Slack channel, where he tirelessly answers questions and helps others write their CodeQL queries. Thank you, Simon!
The Supply Chain Sentinel Award recognizes a community member who has contributed to make the software supply chain more secure, by finding, disclosing, or fixing security vulnerabilities in open source projects or in supply chain tooling, or by providing information on known vulnerabilities to the ecosystem.
Audience Choice Award
Winners of the Audience Choice Award were voted on by GitHub Universe attendees and viewers at home.
Prisma is an open source ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool that simplifies database access for developers. It provides type-safe queries and seamless integration with JavaScript and TypeScript, making it easier to work with relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite. Prisma abstracts the complexity of database management while offering high flexibility, making it a popular choice among modern backend developers. A huge shoutout to Prisma for empowering developers to ship faster, with confidence, and without sacrificing control! 🥂🎉
The Audience Choice Award recognizes a project that has been voted by developers as a project that has helped them create an impact.
Education Awards
Lighthouse Award
Manitej, 17, from Houston, Acon, 18, from Toronto, and Belle, 19 from Malaysia, ran the 2024 Summer Arcade, where any teenager globally could hack on an open source project, log their hours, and redeem awesome prizes. These organizers used GitHub Copilot to code the bots that powered Arcade, and wrote GitHub integrations that analyzed student projects. Through the campaign, 5,000 teenagers around the world logged over 135,000 hours of coding, and many deployed their first lines of code on GitHub, none of which would have been possible without the work of the Summer Arcade organizers. Thank you Manitej, Acon, and Belle for encouraging your peers and the next generation to learn how to code and collaborate on software to build cool things!
(Psst, if this sounds cool, see what Hack Club and GitHub are doing next with High Seas, a global challenge to every teenager on the planet to spend their winters coding open source projects.)
The Lighthouse Award recognizes students who lead fellow learners by shining a light to their communities through open source.
Empowering Educator Award
Does your professor shepherd new open source contributors and promote diversity in computing? This one (Empowering Educator Award winner, Dr. Emily Lovell) does! Dr. Emily Lovell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Her research and teaching use novel domains to invite broader participation in computing, with her postdoctoral work focusing on newcomers to open source. She leads the Contributor Catalyst program at UC Santa Cruz and has, for the past two summers, hosted a cohort of students from HBCUs and supported them in becoming productive contributors and members of GitHub-hosted open source projects and communities, such as OpenSSF Scorecard, p5.js, and Mozilla Firefox DevTools. This year, she was awarded a $1M grant from the National Science Foundation to expand her work over the next three years to five more HBCU partner universities! Beyond the classroom, Emily serves on UCSC’s largest student-run hackathon advisory board, mentors for Google Summer of Code, and partners with student groups to promote open source education.
The Empowering Education Award recognizes educators and teachers who provide support and answers to fellow members of their communities.
Phenomenal Education Partner Award
Codédex is a brand new way to learn to code online. The platform provides a way for learners to earn experience points (XP) as they journey through the fantasy land of Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Command Line, and Git & GitHub, unlock new regions, and collect badges at their own pace. (Cue the Super Mario Bros PowerUp sound effect!) At only two-years-old, Codédex is already used in over 800 high schools and colleges in the United States, Canada, Japan, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and India. GitHub first partnered with Codédex in Spring of 2024. Since then, they’ve held monthly challenges, hosted hackathons, and built engaging projects that have been enjoyed by an active user base of over 200,000 people. They also hit the road for a 2024 Fall Campus Tour, which included workshops, swag, and support to some of the biggest coding clubs at colleges across the North American east coast. Codédex hits the spot of community and collaboration for a generation of hungry young coders.
The Phenomenal Education Partner Award recognizes GitHub Education partners that provide strong support and opportunities for students, teachers, and schools.
Customer Awards
OSPO Leadership Award
Zerodha, one of India’s largest stock broking platforms,has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the future of open source. They consistently share their projects and support global open source initiatives. Recently, they introduced a $1 million per year, no-strings-attached funding program to further support open source development. Their strong examples inspire a wide range of organizations to embrace open source practices and contribute to the ecosystem.
The OSPO Leadership Award recognizes OSPOs who have demonstrated that it’s not only possible to innovate in the enterprise by focusing on open source, it’s essential. By separating out and addressing the real business risks and organizational challenges from FUD and inertia, successful OSPOs are blazing a trail for the industry as a whole to use, contribute to, and publish open source software.
AI Champion Award
Sumeet Shetty is the Head of Tools India at SAP, where he’s enabled thousands of developers to supercharge development with Copilot. A dedicated and knowledgeable GitHub Champion, Sumeet has shared his thought leadership to showcase how his organization leverages Copilot to uplevel developer experience.
The AI Champion Award recognizes GitHub’s brightest customer champions who have shared their best-in-class stories and thought leadership spotlighting how they have transformed their developer organizations, enabling our community to learn from their insights and apply these learnings back to their own GitHub journey.
GitHub for Good
What kinds of high-impact problems could be addressed with AI? The Hive, USA for UNHCR’s data science and innovation lab, conducted research to address the growing need for refugee housing. According to UNHCR, 22% of the 43 million refugees around the world live in camps—temporary facilities built to respond to specific emergencies. And as the need for refugee housing grows, the planning becomes more complex. Through their research, The Hive uncovered possible AI solutions to make this work easier. That’s just one way The Hive is putting modern advances to work solving real-world problems and using technology to do good.
The GitHub for Good Award recognizes a nonprofit or social sector organization who has leveraged GitHub for good to empower developers to make a positive difference in the world.
Partner Awards
Overall Channel Partner of the Year
Offering specialized expertise in application development, cloud deployment services, GitHub migration and integration, and more, not to mention support in English, French, and German, GitHub channel partner Xebia has excelled across regions and categories of work. They demonstrate exceptional innovation and deliver significant value to our mutual customers. Xebia has been a true leader in collaboration and growth within the GitHub ecosystem.
This award recognizes the channel partner that has demonstrated excellence across multiple areas, including platform utilization, AI integration, security implementation, customer satisfaction, and overall business impact, contributing significantly to GitHub’s success.
Global Systems Integrator Partner of the Year
NTT Data has driven significant business impact by integrating GitHub into enterprise environments, fostering innovation, accelerating digital transformation, and empowering developers worldwide. Their strategic alignment with GitHub and commitment to customer success have set a new standard for excellence in the global partner ecosystem.
This award recognizes the GSI channel partner that has demonstrated excellence across multiple areas, including platform utilization, AI integration, security implementation, customer satisfaction, and overall business impact, contributing significantly to GitHub’s success.
Technology Partner of the Year
You might say that GitHub and ARM go, well, arm in arm, having worked closely together for several years and recently shipping ArmⓇ-based Linux and Windows runners for GitHub Actions, which modernizes and accelerates development workflows from the cloud to the edge.
As part of our Technology Partnership Program, ARM is continuing to build and extend developer access with their GitHub Copilot Extension.
This collaboration scales and democratizes access to ARM’s 100 million developer ecosystem.
The GitHub Technology Partner of Year Award acknowledges outstanding success and innovations by a technology partner on the GitHub platform.
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