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Announcing the winners of the first TurnKey development contest
Ladies and gentlemen, by now you are all shuddering in anticipation, dying to find out who won the very first TurnKey appliance development contest... in the history of the universe!
The stakes couldn't be higher. In truth, all three of our winners will lavish in (varying proportions of) unending fame and riches, but only one man will get the exotic, elusive embodiment of the Django pony goddess. Oh ye most blasphemous infidel will ask, why thee persists in worshiping a pony, thus pink and plush. Hush I say, tis not any earthly pony we worship, but the very symbol of the holy bond that ties all open source communities together. So say we all!
As you might recall from the summary of the contest published a few weeks ago, Basil Kurian and Adrian Moya were the two obvious candidates for the first place. We asked the community for feedback on who should win, and received hundreds of votes to the poll.
Before I announce the winners, let's give both of them a big round of virtual applause for participating in the contest and amazing us with their contributions. If it weren't for these two, the contest would surely have been a complete failure and we would have crossed off community contests from our list of good ideas. But thankfully these two heros came along, gave it their all in the true spirit of open source and now the upcoming release is going to nearly double the size of the TurnKey library. As soon as we have enough loot to give away (we're working on that) we'd like to try sponsoring more contests.
Alright, enough with the suspense. The winners:
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Adrian Moya wins the gold!
First prize: $1500 and his very own pony.
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Basil Kurian wins the silver!
Second prize: $800.
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Rik Goldman wins the bronze!
Third prize: $100.
Cliche or not, everyone who participated in the contest is a winner in my book. We're going to be posting interviews with Adrian and Basil on the blog as soon as the release comes out, so everyone can get to know them better. Earlier we posted an interview with Rik Goldman.
Behind the scenes
Both Adrian and Basil did such fantastic work on the contest that it was hard to decide who won first place. Not just for us. Most of the community had trouble deciding as well. The most popular option in the poll was a tie, amongst both registered and anonymous users. So it was close, but Alon and I talked it over and decided it couldn't be a tie. It's a contest after all! In the real world no two quantities are exactly equal even if they sort of look that way from a distance. So if you measure accurately enough, one will have to be larger than the other, even if only by a little bit.
The problem is the closer it gets, the harder the measurement. There has to be a fair basis for deciding one way or the other.
We came up with a formula for assigning points to contributions:
Audience * Integration + Documentation
The rational behind this is that the value provided by the integration is multiplied by the size of the audience because you're providing that value over and over again to more people. The documentation adds value because it makes it easier for us to understand and adopt the TKLPatch, and it also makes it a better example for other budding community developers. But that value isn't multiplied over the entire audience, so it's an added rather than multiplied value.
When we ran the numbers through the formula Adrian got 101 points and Basil got 83.
We also looked at feedback from the community as reflected in the poll votes. To avoid bias we didn't count votes from India or Venezuela, our contestants home countries.
Non anonymous votes:
- Tie (43%)
- Adrian (38%)
- Basil (19%)
Anonymous votes:
- Tie (66%)
- Adrian (24%)
- Basil (10%)
As you can see most people found it difficult to decide and voted for a tie. Among the minority that decided, Adrian got roughly twice as many votes.
That's all folks. Congratulations to our winners!
Comments
Congrats guys!
Excellent work to all 3 of you! And of course Liraz and Alon and the rest of the TKL community and contributors! Whilst it is a bit of a cliche to say that "we're all winners" the reality is that it's true. I can't speak for others but I know I learned a lot and all the patches flying around was what convinced me to have a go too. And the biggest winner of all I think is the wider community who will now benefit from a soon to be HUGE TKL appliance library and all for free! How incredible is that! This contest, TKL in general show that open source is really such a win-win model for innovation!
So I think we can honestly say that the contest was a huge success! Yay!!
Thanks
Thanks a lot for the encouragement and support :)
Congratulations and thanks
Sincerest congratulations to Basil and Adrian. And congratulations too to Liraz, Alon, and TurnKey Linux for a successful contest. What a boon to the community.
I am also very thankful that TKL was there for us when we needed somewhere to make an authentic difference. Tremendous thanks to Jedmeister for the encouragement, Liraz and Alon for the support...and our thanks to #ampache on freenode - their support is unrelenting.
Sincerest congrats to the contributing students from Chelsea School: Curtis Fawcett, Maurice Quarles, Steven Robinson, Adrian Madison, and Jerel Moses.
Congratulations
Everyone's contributions to TKL are simply amazing. You may not realize it, but your work in this contest will inspire and help many people. I hope all who participate in this community know they are greatly appreciated.
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