The University of Texas at Austin

Deadlines

• Submission of Nomination Materials: 5:00 pm, Friday, Feb 1, 2008.
• Winners Notified: Friday, March 28, 2008.
• Award Ceremony: TBD, April, 2008.

The University Co-Op has established two annual prizes for open source software. Each prize is $3000; one is awarded to faculty or staff-led teams and the other to student teams. The prize is open to all faculty, staff and students in The University. The details of the competition are given below.

Award Criteria

The University Co-Op Open Source Software Awards are intended to encourage the growth of the UT Austin open source software community and the widespread availability of useful software under open source terms. The winners shall be selected on the basis of the utility and impact of their software, as assessed by the panel of judges.

Note: These criteria are intentionally broad and the judges are hereby given great latitude in interpreting them. One indication of impact might be the number of users. But another might be the scientific or social good facilitated by the software even though the direct user community might be small. For example, the winning software might be used by millions because it provides a reliable and convenient open source alternative to commercially available tools. But another winner might be for software that greatly improves the lives of a few people unable to access comparable commercial tools. The nomination form provides an opportunity for the nominators themselves to articulate the case for a given piece of software.

In the absence of suitable nominees, the judges may decline to make an award.

Author(s) Eligibility:

For the Faculty/Staff award, at least one team member must be a member of the UT Faculty or Staff (including Post Doctoral fellows and Research Professors and Scientist's of all ranks) and that member must have held a UT Faculty or Staff appointment sometime during the academic year in question. Faculty/Staff teams may contain other members unaffiliated with UT, e.g., local professionals. For the Student award, a team must consist entirely of Graduate and/or Undergraduate, Students and each team member must have been a registered student sometime during the academic year in question. (For example, a student who graduates in December is eligible for the award even though that student may no longer be enrolled at the time of the nomination.)

Teams of size 1 are permitted. Team members not affiliated with UT are permitted in Faculty/Staff teams provided the conditions above are satisfied.

No member of the panel of judges may be nominated nor be a member of the development team of a piece of nominated software. See below.

Criteria for Open Source Designation:

To qualify, software must be provided to the end user (and to this competition) with source code and must be licensed in such a manner that it can be used free of charge in academic and research settings. (This criteria is compatible with that of the ACM Open Source Software competition, and nominees are encouraged to enter both competitions.)

Submissions:

The submission criteria below are taken almost verbatim from those for the ACM Open Source Software Competition.

For the competition, the software will be built from the sources. Submissions should be made in the form of a compressed zip or tar archive file and must include the following:

• A text file named README.txt which summarizes the purpose of the software and its overall design and use.
• A text file named INSTALL.txt which includes any and all instructions on building and installing the software and any system requirements. The judging committee will make a reasonable effort to build any submitted software. However, non-buildable software must unfortunately be excluded from the competition. Therefore, complete and clear build and install instructions are a crucial component of any submission.

Additionally, authors are highly encouraged to provide as much documentation as possible, including examples of how the provided software might be used.

People interested in submitting an entry should send the following information via email to opensource@cs.utexas.edu by the deadline specified.

• Category: Faculty/Staff or Student
• Team members: For each member of the team, give the
  • Name
  • Title (if a member of faculty or staff) or student status (graduate or undergraduate)
  • Departmental or other University unit affiliation
  • Email address, and
  • Indicate the dates of employment or enrollment for the current academic year
• Name of Submitted Software
• Brief Overview (i.e., purpose, intended audience, main features, etc.)
• Justification: No more than 2 pages describing why this submission deserves the award. For example, explain why it fills an important need. If the software is already in use, characterize the size and activity of the user community.
• Source Code: Compressed tar or zip archive file with all source code and installation and use documentation.

Please note: If the archive file is more than 5MB in size, please place the file in a web accessible location, and send a URL for that location instead.

The Judges

The panel of judges shall be assembled by the chair of the UT Austin Department of Computer Sciences (UTCS) and shall consist of at least five people distributed among:

• The UTCS faculty (chair of the committee)
• The faculty of some other University department
• The University staff
• Graduate students
• Undergraduates
• A professional working outside the University

When possible, members of the winning teams from past years will be invited to fill these five slots, but care will be taken not to create a majority voting block from any one department. Should a judge be a member of the development team of a piece of software that is nominated, the judge will be excused, and the CS chair will find a new judge to serve in his or her place.