The Netbuilder Awards

(This proposal draft was last updated Jan 29 1998.)

Introduction
Purpose Of The Netbuilder Awards
Who Will Give Out The Awards?
What Will The Awards Be?
Who Will Be Eligible?
Who Will Pay For All This?
Who Is Behind This Proposal?
How To Get Involved

Introduction

Free software and good works done for the Internet ought to be rewarded. While the Internet culture of the past has been pretty good at recognizing talent and hard work and rewarding it with prestige in the community, the close-knit community awareness that sustained this implicit reward structure seems unlikely to be sustainable as the population of "cyberspace" explodes.

Accordingly, I think it's time to develop a more explicit reward structure. I would like to try to assemble a group of prestigious tribal elders of the free-software, Internet, and Linux/UNIX cultures to give out periodic awards recognizing achievement in free software and praiseworthy services to the Internet and its culture.

My tentative proposed name for these awards is the "Netbuilder" awards (informally, "Spiders"). This is intended to refer not just to the Internet and WWW but to the intangible webs of cooperation, voluntary exchange, shared history, and trust that make the hacker culture work.

The model I have in mind for the Netbuilder Awards is the "Hugo Awards" of SF fandom. The Hugo tradition offers many procedural tips and half-explicit traditions useful for organizing an award that rewards excellence, affirms the community feeling of its constituency, and manages not to be stuffy.

A worthy goal for the Netbuilder awards is that they develop a level of prestige, authority, and benefits for their recipients in the net culture analogous to or exceeding that of the Hugos within SF fandom.

Purpose of the Netbuilders Awards

To reward and encourage excellence in free software. To reward and encourage volunteer contributions to the net and the "hacker culture" in its broadest sense, including the Internet and Usenet and all places elsewhere that the hacker traditions of voluntary code- and information-sharing, creativity, and cooperative individualism reaches.

Who Will Give Out The Awards?

The Netbuilder awards will be issued by a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation formed for the purpose, the Netbuilder Foundation. This corporation will recruit an awards committee composed of eminent members of the free-software and Internet cultures, who will issue the awards (generally based on recommendations received from the Internet at large).

To support the Awards Committee, the Netbuilder Foundation will be chartered to include a Governing Board and staff. Staff positions may include a Director, Secretary/Archivist, and Treasurer (optionally, the Grand, Puissant, and Totipotent Arachnids).

Membership in the Governing Board, Awards Committee and staff may and often will overlap. Practice of the organization will be patterned where applicable on nonprofit user-service groups such as Usenix and professional societies such as ACM and IEEE.

Foundation business will be conducted primarily via email, IRC, teleconferencing, the Web, and other network media appropriate to its mission. Besides being symbolically appropriate, this will avoid unnecessary demands on the face time of busy members!

What Will The Awards Be?

There will be three different classes of awards:

Excellence awards for specific free-software or network-service projects. These will consist of an engraved certificate and a symbolic small cash award (perhaps $50-$100).
Lifetime Achievement awards made to persons with an outstanding record of contributions to the free-software and Internet cultures. These will consist of a trophy or award analogous to the Hugo rocketship, a substantial cash award (perhaps as much as $1000-$5000), and an entailed invitation to join the corporation's Board Of Directors and/or Awards Committee.
Special awards made at the Committee's discretion. These will consist of a plaque and a moderate-sized cash award (perhaps $250-$500). The special awards will offer a way to experiment, and will be expected to sometimes lead to the development of new "regular" categories to go with the Excellence and Lifetime Achievement awards.

All awards will include a tasteful lapel pin in the form of a spider (the original netbuilder) suitable for wear at professional conferences and backyard beer bashes, and be recorded in a registry page on the World Wide Web.

Who Will Be Eligible?

Rewards will typically go to individuals, but may occasionally at the Awards Comittee's discretion be presented to a project group as a whole.

Excellence Awards

To be eligible for an Excellence award, the candidate(s) must originate a program or information resource that is:

available without charge over the Internet.
deserving of recognition for utility, technical elegance, and/or sheer hack value.
distributed in modifiable source form with a GPL, X Consortium, Berkeley-style or "Artistic"-style license permitting free re-use and free redistribution. (License provisions barring use or modification for profit may not absolutely preclude eligibility, but will raise the bar on the other standards considerably.)
if the candidate resource is a program, it must be possible to build and run the program on a stock version of one of the widely-used freeware operating systems (including but not limited to Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD).

Lifetime Achievement Awards

To be eligible for a Lifetime Achievement award, the candidate(s) must have made an outstanding contribution to the hacker culture and the Internet, through

unique and exceptional technical innovation that opened up possibilities still resonant within the culture,
a long-standing record of service to the hacker culture and/or the net as an organizer, role-model, doer of the utterly necessary but unexciting, and/or tribal elder.

Where Excellence awards are intended to confer fame, the Lifetime Achievement awards are intended to confirm a reputation already well-earned. Every Lifetime Achievement awardee should be someone of whom the knowledgeable will say "Well, of course!"

Special Awards

Special Awards may occasionally conferred at the Awards Committee's discretion in cognizance of the charter purposes of the Netbuilder awards, as a way of recognizing praiseworthy projects or conduct not covered by the existing regular categories and, experimenting with new categories.

Who Will Pay For All This?

In 1994 I discussed an ancestor of this proposal with Rich Morin, founder of Prime Time Software. He expressed the belief that many of the small companies now making money redistributing Internet software in CD and other form would contribute to an award program of this kind both for sound business reasons (to encourage a bigger crop of free software) and to express their appreciation of and solidarity with the culture that produces free software.

I have since received tentative expressions of interest from a very well-known software millionaire (no, not Bill the Gates!) who shall remain nameless pending a decision to become more involved.

The Netbuilder Awards program as I envision it, cash awards and all, could easily be run on a budget of $75K a year (that includes stipends for two part-time positions to run the mechanics). I do not anticipate great difficulty raising this volume of cash.

Who is Behind This Proposal?

This proposal has not yet been broadcast. If you're reading it, you probably know who I am. If by any chance you don't, see my home page at https://tuxedo.org/~esr.

My qualifications for founding this award series and the organization to go with it are three:

As the editor of the Jargon File and through various other projects, I think I've established contacts and a network reputation sufficient that the attempt will at least not be dismissed out of hand before it has a chance to establish itself.
I've co-founded and helped run a successful Internet-related nonprofit organization (Chester County InterLink) and thus have some idea how to make the nuts and bolts work.
Last but hardly least, I thought up the idea and I believe in it.

A few people in a position to help make this concept work have told me I can use their names to help stimulate more interest in it. These people include Richard M. Stallman, Henry Spencer, Rich Morin, and Mitch Kapor.

How To Get Involved

If you are seeing the proposal at this early stage, it's probably because I want you as a member of the Netbuilder Foundation's charter Governing Board or Awards Committee, or both; or, I think you can suggest candidates for these positions; or, I think you can line up an institutional sponsor; or, I think you otherwise have wisdom to offer.

So, please . Tell me what you think; tell me how you'd like to help. Tell me how we can make this concept work.

I think the early decision most critical to the effort will be who will be the charter members of the Awards Committee. For the award to develop the proper weight, all the members must have sufficient public prestige that any halfway-knowledgeable hacker reading the list would readily grant them them Lifetime Achievement status.

Here is my notion of an Awards Committee "dream team":


[email protected] (Marc Andreesen)
[email protected] (James Gosling)
[email protected] (Bill Joy)
[email protected] (Brian Kernighan)
[email protected] (Dennis Ritchie)
[email protected] (Henry Spencer)
[email protected] (Richard M. Stallman)
[email protected] (Guy Steele)
[email protected] (Ken Thompson)
[email protected] (Linus Torvalds)
[email protected] (Larry Wall)

All these people are being asked to join.

I will be setting up an Internet mailing list, , to carry forward this proposal.

Eric S. Raymond <[email protected]>