Prizes

What can a winner of a Mozilla Award look forward to?

• He or she will receive a special prize, still to be determined. (Got any suggestions for a good prize? Post them on MozillaZine! Our budget may be limited, but our imaginations don't have to be.)
• He or she will be christened with a special Wu name appropriate to the nature of their contribution. Awardees will have the right to be addressed by their Wu names in Mozilla newsgroups, IRC channels, and other online and offline forums in which Mozilla hackers gather.
• He or she will gain the people's ovation and fame forever.

Award Categories

For the first annual Mozilla Awards we've decided to make awards in five main categories, to reflect the broad spectrum of contributions people make to the Mozilla project. The categories are as follows, with their corresponding Wu name:

"Masta Codah" (for excellence in Mozilla development). Persons eligible for this award include anyone who has contributed new functionality to Mozilla, however implemented (i.e., in C++, C, Java, JavaScript, etc.). Besides core Mozilla features, contributions eligible for this category include Mozilla add-ons and plug-ins, new user interfaces (but not simple skins or splash screens), and anything else primarily involving the creation of new Mozilla code.

"Ghostbug Killah" (for excellence in Mozilla bug fixing). Persons eligible for this award include anyone who has contributed patches to Mozilla to fix bugs, correct memory leaks, improve performance, etc. - anything which makes the Mozilla builds faster, smaller, and more reliable.

"Methodical Man/Woman" (for excellence in Mozilla testing). Persons eligible for this award include anyone who has contributed to better and more thorough testing of Mozilla, including submitting bug reports, reviewing and cleaning up existing bug reports, submitting test cases, writing test suites or test harnesses, doing code instrumentation and performance profiling, and any other work that improves test coverage of Mozilla.

"Inspectah Doc" (for excellence in Mozilla documentation). Persons eligible for this award include anyone who has contributed written material concerning Mozilla, including documentation of Mozilla features and internals, tutorials on Mozilla use or Mozilla hacking, Mozilla build instructions, Mozilla FAQs, and any other prose (i.e., non-code) material that's useful to Mozilla hackers, testers, and end users.

"Ol' Dirty Keyboard (ODK)" (all-around most excellent Mozilla volunteer). Persons eligible for this award include anyone who contributes to Mozilla on a volunteer basis. Eligible contributions include anything described in the above categories plus pretty much anything else you can think of, as long as it's helped further the goals of the Mozilla project. (Besides coding, bug fixing, testing, and documenting, other activities eligible for this award include porting Mozilla to new platforms, doing language translations and associated localization work, providing Mozilla-related support and help in the Mozilla newsgroups and IRC channels, and doing general Mozilla evangelism on-line or off.)

The judges also reserve the right to make additional special awards depending on how they happen to feel that day.

Award Procedures

The Mozilla Awards procedures will be conducted on the MozillaZine site through a two-part procedure of nomination followed by voting. You must be a registered MozillaZine user to participate in either nomination or voting; if you're not already a registered user and want to participate in the awards you should create a new MozillaZine account.

During the nomination phase, you may nominate persons of your choice for any of the awards. As part of your nomination you should indicate why you believe the person you're nominating is worthy of the award; if you can, please include URLs or other references to work they've done, so that others may evaluate it as well. You may also second the nominations of people nominated by others; again, please explain in your own words why you feel the nominees are worthy of an award. You may also nominate a person in multiple categories; for example, you may nominate a person for both the "Masta Codah" and "Ol' Dirty Keyboard" awards, if they happen to be a volunteer Mozilla coder.

We will accept nominations for a limited period of time. (See the awards schedule below.) After the nomination period closes, the judges will select up to four nominees for each award, based on the number of nominations received and the quality of the nominees' contributions as attested to by the nomination statements and independent evaluation. At that point we will proceed to a voting phase, during which registered MozillaZine members can vote for the award candidates of their choice (one per award, of course). Please vote only once. We know that people can technically vote multiple times by registering for multiple MozillaZine accounts; there's nothing that can be done to prevent that, but the judges will intervene in cases where there's obvious ballot stuffing or similar shenanigans.

After the voting period ends the judges will check the results and announce the award winners. As noted above, the judges may at their discretion alter or ignore results that appear to be bogus; however this will be a last resort step, not to be taken lightly.

The schedule for the Mozilla Awards is as follows:

• The nominations period opens today. Nominations should be submitted on MozillaZine as replies to this article. The subject should contain the category of the nomination, and the nominee's name.
• March 9, 2000. Beginning of nomination process.
• March 13, 2000. Last day for nominations.
• March 14, 2000. Begin voting for awards as soon the notice is given on MozillaZine.
• March 20, 2000. Last day for voting.
• March 21, 2000. Award winners announced.
• April 6, 2000. The awards ceremony itself will be held at the Mozilla Anniversary party in San Francisco, CA.

Judges for the awards will be Chris Nelson of MozillaZine and Mike Shaver and Frank Hecker of mozilla.org.

The Fine Print