On Monday of this week Omeka, the open source platform we’ve created here at CHNM, won a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. Omeka was one of ten winners this year. As nice as it was to receive the money, which will help fuel Omeka’s further development, it was just as nice to have our work recognized by a prize committee that was a virtual Who’s Who of the Internet–Vint Cerf (Google), Tim Bernersâ€Lee (Director of the World Wide Web Consortium), Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), John Gage (recently of Sun Microsystems), and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media). To be recognized by this group as excellent, one’s work must be good.
I can’t claim any credit at all for the development of Omeka. I’ve strictly been an observer and end user. My two years of experience with Omeka on our 1989 project had convinced me that it was a very robust and useful platform. I just didn’t know it was that good. So, contratulations to the Omeka team at CHNM on an award well-deserved.