During this year’s MongoSV, 10gen presented awards to peer-nominated community members for their contributions to the MongoDB project.

There were 3 different categories:

1. Innovative Application Award - recognizes a company or individual who has built an innovative application using MongoDB.
2. Core Contributor Award - recognizes a community member for significant contribution to the codebase of the MongoDB core server, language drivers, or tools.
3. Community Champion Award - recognizes an individual for their efforts evangelizing and growing the MongoDB community.

This is the first year that 10gen has organized these awards. I think they’re a great way to recognize the contributions made by a few members of the community. I hope a significant portion of people in the community took the time to nominate or vote for another individual. I suspect more community members will participate and 10gen will do a more to advertise the program in years to come.

Community Champion Award

I was honored to be selected as a finalist in the Community Champion category. As a co-organizer for both the Washington DC MongoDB User Group and DevOps DC, I work to bring together people who are interested in MongoDB and other great technologies. We’ve grown the MongoDB group to over 250 members through consistent meetings, detailed event summaries, and good beer.

I’m going to SXSW Interactive!

Shortly before the voting was opened to the public, 10gen announced the grand prize: a trip to South By Southwest Interactive. The nomination and being selected as a finalist were a great recognition of my effort and accomplishments. However, I’ve always wanted to got to SXSW. Once I found out this was the prize, I was really excited at the possibility of winning the award!

As I reviewed the finalists, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be selected as the winner. Everyone on the list has made some incredible contributions to the community.

At the end of MongoSV the winners were announced. It was quite a surprise to find out I’d been selected as the winner in the Community Champion category! This was the perfect end to a great two days for me which included the MongoDB Masters Summit and presenting at the conference.

Thanks!

A heartfelt THANK YOU is in order for all of the members of the MongoDC group who nominated and voted for me, for 10gen for organizing the contest and awards, and my colleagues, friends, and family who ‘rocked the vote’!

I’m looking forward to meeting up with the other Community Award winners in Austin!