It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

I would now like to invite you to send in nominations for the MySQL Community Awards 2013, in the categories listed below. The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and will be announced on Wednesday, April 24th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the community reception event of the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards [at] gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday January 31st (Pacific time)

Include a short explanation of why you think nominee deserves the award. Don't assume the members of the panel know what you know! Also disclose your relationship with the nominee, for example: I've used X for 5 years / I'm a customer of X / X is my customer / X is my employer / etc...

The Categories

You can nominate as many candidates as you want in the following categories. In fact the panel welcomes as many suggestions as you can think of and we'd especially like to have lots of ideas for the second and third categories. There could be great MySQL users and sponsors out there that we are not aware of just by reading Planet MySQL - if you know of someone who deserves to be highlighted, even your own employer or business contact, please let us know!

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2013

This is a person that has done valuable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. Often this means either contributing code or insight, but there is no formal definition excluding other contributions.

In this and the other categories anyone active in "the MySQL ecosystem" is eligible. This includes certainly all the various forks, but also adjacent software that is an integral part of the community. As an example, previous winners have included contributors to XAMPP and Maatkit.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2013

This award is given typically to an application that uses MySQL, but could also be a useful utility or other "associated" software. "Application" naturally counts websites too.

In fact the Alexa Top 10 websites is a who's who of winners of this award: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr/Yahoo, Youtube/Google and Wikipedia have all received the award. On the other hand utilities used to enhance MySQL itself have also been awarded: Tungsten Replicator, Xtrabackup and Xtrabackup Manager are all past winners of this award too.

Note that for websites and applications we don't always know whether they use MySQL, so it is important that you tell us about them by nominating them!

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2013

This award is given to a company, organization or other non-person that has made valuable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem. This could be by employing developers, donating hardware, cash or something else, basically anything that you think is helpful.

For historical context, there used to be a "Partner of the Year" award handed out to official MySQL AB partners. As a community panel, we naturally cannot hand out such an award, rather this category is intended as a replacement: to award "partners" of the community.

Rackspace, Percona, DeNA, O'Reilly Media, Monty Program and Oracle MySQL Community Team are winners of this category in its modern form.

Previous years winners

When thinking of good nominees, I often find it helpful to seek inspiration by looking at the list of winners from previous years in MySQL Hall of Fame.

The Panel

The winners will be selected by a panel consisting of winners of the Community Contributor awards from 2009 to 2012. Henrik Ingo and Shlomi Noach are acting as non-voting secretaries in charge of the voting process.