Linux Solutions

Linden Lab, the creator of virtual world ‘Second Life’, acknowledged the accomplishments of the open source community this week at its Linden Lab Innovation Awards. The “Mixed Reality” ceremony awarded seven winners at a convention centre in Florida, as well as on Second Life.

This is the second time this event has taken place, and Linden Lab’s head of open source development Rob Lanphier took the stand to present the awards, at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC). A panel of six judges selected the winners, who each received a “Hippo Award” prize package.

Judges chose two winners in the Best Documentation category. Asuka Neely and Gally Young were awarded for their contributions translating volumes of Second Life wiki documentation into Japanese and French, respectively.

The Best Community Organiser category was spilt in to two areas, one went to Tao Takahi for Best Working Group Organiser for his contributions to the Second Life Architecture Working Group (AWG) ,who are the group that pusses to standardise the protocols and data formats used in the system to make them interproperable with other virtual worlds. The other award went to Harleen Gretzky was recognised as Best Issue Tracker Organiser for her work on PJIRA, the projects issue tracker.

Mm Adler was awarded the Best Code Contribution award, for her voice-to-lip synching model, that was described by Lanphier as “tidy and thoughtful in its execution”.

The Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence - named in memory of a respected Second Life developer and community member who died last year – went to Lex Neva, who was singled out not only for making significant contributions to issue tracking on PJIRA, but also for maintaining “constructive and thoughtful” commentary and dialog within the Second Life community.

The final award went to Michelle Zenovka, for Contributor of the Year, for her code contributions in transmitting the Second Life viewer to CMake, and bringing up the Linux viewer client up to scratch with the Windows and Mac OS X builds.

Nominations for the awards are open to the community.