Apparently I got an
honour from OpenUK.
There are a bunch of people I know on that list. Chris Lamb and Mark Brown
are familiar names from
Debian. Colin King and
Jonathan Riddell are people I know from past work in
Ubuntu. I ve admired David MacIver s work on
Hypothesis and Richard Hughes work on
firmware updates from afar. And there are a bunch of
other excellent projects represented there:
OpenStreetMap,
Textualize, and my alma mater of
Cambridge to name but a few.
My friend Stuart Langridge
wrote about
being on a similar list a few years ago, and I can t do much better than to
echo it: in particular he wrote about the way the open source development
community is often at best unwelcoming to people who don t look like Stuart
and I do. I can t tell a whole lot about demographic distribution just by
looking at a list of names, but while these honours still seem to be skewed
somewhat male, I m fairly sure they re doing a lot better in terms of gender
balance than my home project of Debian is, for one. I hope this is a sign
of improvement for the future, and I ll do what I can to pay it forward.