Deb Nicholson Receives the Award for the Advancement of Free Software

[Software Freedom Conservancy]

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/mar/25/fsfawardDeb/

We are proud to announce that our Director of Community Operations, Deb
Nicholson, won this year’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
The award was presented on Saturday, March 23rd at LibrePlanet
<https://libreplanet.org/2019/>, the Free Software Foundation’s annual
conference at MIT’s Stata Center. The Free Software Foundation gives out
two awards each year
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSF_Free_Software_Awards>, one for the
Advancement of Free Software and one for Projects of Social Benefit.

Deb receives the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for her work
to bring free software to artists and musicians with GNU MediaGoblin as
a Community Liaison and as a founding board member of Open Hatch, whose
mission was to build a welcoming committee for free software. She’s also
a founding organizer of the annual Seattle GNU/Linux conference
<https://seagl.org/> aka SeaGL, which is committed to surfacing new
voices and she works with Conservancy’s many projects to help them
achieve their goals. She became part of the free software movement in
2006, when she accepted a job with the Free Software Foundation in
downtown Boston.

Deb joined the Conservancy team
<https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/may/01/deb-nicholson-director-community-operations/>
a little less than a year ago. “Free software is critically important
for autonomy, privacy and a healthy democracy — but it can’t achieve
that if it is only accessible for some, or if it is alienating for large
swathes of people. That’s why it’s so important that we continue
surfacing new voices, making room for non-coders and welcoming new
contributors into the free software community. I also find that in
addition to helping us build a better, bigger movement, the work of
welcoming is extremely rewarding,” said Nicholson.

John Sullivan, Executive Director at the Free Software Foundation adds,
“I couldn’t be happier about this opportunity for the FSF to publicly
honor and appreciate Deb Nicholson. In the many years I’ve known Deb, I
have seen her directly make so many positive changes in the free
software movement that I can’t keep track: successfully connecting
institutional and financial resources with free software projects that
need them, organizing impactful conferences, driving program user
interface improvements, and many other initiatives that have both
brought more users and developers to free software and helped everyone
get more work done in critical areas.”

“Deb’s contributions to the software freedom movement are longstanding
and impressive. We at Conservancy are thrilled to see her receive the
recognition she deserves,” commented Karen Sandler, Conservancy’s
Executive Director. Deb’s work is all the more laudable for her
commitment to contribute substantial volunteer hours over a long period
of time - even when it wasn’t part of her job to do so, she took on the
tough problems in free software to help shape a more effective and
inclusive movement.”

This year’s recipient of the Award for Projects of Social Benefit was
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team <https://www.hotosm.org/> aka HOT. The
award was accepted on behalf of the project by Kate Chapman, who served
as their first Executive Director. We’re well acquainted with Kate’s
free software work since she has been serving as a Conservancy Board
Director for the last three years. Outreachy
<https://www.outreachy.org/>, now a Conservancy project, won the Award
for Projects of Social Benefit for 2013 and our Executive Director,
Karen Sandler won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software last
year. We consider it a mark of deep respect that our colleagues think so
highly of our work to promote and share the message of software freedom.


      About Conservancy

Conservancy, a public charity focused on ethical technology, is the home
of nearly fifty member projects dedicated to developing free and open
source software. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella, allowing
member projects to operate as charitable initiatives without having to
independently manage their own corporate structure and administrative
services.

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