Each year at EclipseCon we announce the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards.  The last 4 years we have recognized worthy individuals and products for their contribution to the Eclipse community.

This year I’d like to take a fresh look at the Eclipse awards and see if we can/should revamp the categories.   Are there other categories we should introduce to acknowledge participation in the community?

As a reminder the individual categories from last year were:

• Top Ambassador
• Top Committer
• Top Contributor
• Top Newcomer Evangelist

And the product/technology categories were:

• Best Developer Tool (Commercial and Open Source)
• Best RCP Application (Commercial and Open Source)
• Best Equinox Based Application (Commercial and Open Source)

Some ideas for new categories:

• Most open Eclipse project  – we would need to come up with a scoring metric
• Most popular Eclipse project  – select this based on voting
• Most popular commercial product – select based on voting  (the existing awards are selected by a judging panel)
• Most prolific blogger  – measured by posting on PlanetEclipse
• Most active committer/contributor – select based on number of bugzillas open/closed?

If we introduce new categories we might drop some of the existing ones, for instance Top Ambassador.

I am looking for ideas and feedback.   We can just go with what we did in the past but I think it is important to keep things fresh.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com