Since 2006, the Advisory Panel has awarded the Pizzigati Prize annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in public interest software development. Each winner serves on the Advisory Panel for three years following their award.

Past Winners:

• Ken Banks (2011)
• Yaw Anokwa (2010)
• Darius Jazayeri (2009)
• Barry Warsaw (2008)
• George Hotelling (2006)

Ken Banks, 2011 Winner

Ken Banks accepted the fifth annual Pizzigati Prize for his creation of FrontlineSMS, a simple yet powerful program that speaks directly to a harsh global reality: Millions of people in remote areas have no access to the Internet, but many do have simple mobile phones.  Banks's software enables grassroots groups to reach these millions using only a laptop computer, a USB cable, and a plain mobile phone — and the constituents of these groups can use their own mobile phones to communicate back.  

Since 2005, nonprofits have downloaded the totally free — and easy to use — FrontlineSMS software almost 13,000 times, for use in a varied assortment of projects across the globe. The first independent news agency in Iraq, for instance, is using the software to send updates to readers in eight different countries.  In Zimbabwe, the software is enabling groups to monitor human rights violations. One group serving overseas Filipino workers is using FrontlineSMS as an emergency help line.

A number of groups and organizations, ranging from National Geographic to the MacArthur Foundation, have noted the wide and positive impact that Banks has had with FrontlineSMS.  Banks himself hopes that his work will have an equally positive impact on the next generation of software developers.  "Stories like mine — developing FrontlineSMS with very limited resources over a five week period — can inspire younger developers," he points out. "They prove that anyone with an idea can make a real difference if they stick with it."

For more information about Banks and FrontlineSMS read the full announcement here.

Yaw Anokwa accepted the fourth annual Pizzigati Prize on behalf of a team of University of Washington doctoral students who crafted an open source application called Open Data Kit (ODK) that unleashes the mobile phone’s social change potential. Anokwa and his fellow developers Carl Hartung and Waylon Brunette developed software that turns cell phones into tools for collecting date ‘in the field’ and moving that data, with just a few finger swipes, to central Web-based servers or local computers. 

With Open Data Kit, grassroots activists can capture and export text, photos, video, audio, barcodes, and even location. “At the heart of ODK,” notes Anokwa, “is a simple idea: make data collection easier.” The software makes that collection easy by letting grassroots groups replace a variety of traditional tools—paper survey forms, cameras, audio recorders, GPS units—with a mobile phone technology that operates independently of any particular mobile phone model. Several groups currently employ ODK, including D-Tree International, the Boston-based nonprofit that nominated Anokwa for the Pizzigati Prize. D-Tree has put ODK to work on a project in Tanzania that helps health aides reduce the high rates of serious illness and premature death from preventable and treatable diseases.

To learn more about Anokwa and ODK, read the full announcement here.

Darius Jazayeri, 2009 winner

Darius accepted the third annual Pizzigati Prize for his creation of OpenMRS, an open source software application that health clinics and hospitals on five continents are using to keep, share, and track medical record data. Thanks to Jazayeri’s application, resource-poor communities around the globe have seen significant improvements to the medical care they can offer.

Jazayeri began work on OpenMRS four years ago as the lead software developer at Partners in Health, a Boston nonprofit working globally to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care. Partners in Health, teaming up with the South African Medical Research council and the University of Indiana Regenstrief Institute, aimed to create a free, flexible medical records system that health providers could customize and operate without the help of expert programmers. With Jazayeri taking the lead, that vision for an easily accessible, user-friendly electronic medical record (EMR) system became a reality.

OpenMRS can be run on anything form a larger server to a laptop computer. Non-programmers can easily add new items to the system and find them within a suite of easy-to-use tools for data analysis and reporting. Health providers in the United States and around the world use the system,which has impacted actual patient care. One hospital in Rwanda was able to use OpenMRS to identify HIV-positive children who had not been picked up by the pediatric program to get them on life-saving treatment.

For more information about Jazayeri, OpenMRS, and other groups using the software, you can read the full announcement here.

Barry Warsaw accepted the second annual Pizzigati Prize as the lead developer of GNU Mailman, an open source application that hundreds of nonprofits around the world are using to manage electronic mail discussions and e-newsletter lists. Warsaw’s free application has built up a large, experienced base of users who have been more than willing to help new users make the best possible use of the software. And Mailman’s design and development team actively listens toand interacts witheveryday users.

GNU Mailman is free software licensed under the GNU Public License, and is a mailing list management application that provides an easy-to-use Web interface for managing mailing lists.Since its unveiling in 1996, GNU Mailman hasbecome the online world’s most popular free mailing list manager. Hundreds of nonprofit sites, from software development projects and community outreach efforts to advocacy organizations and religious groups, currently use Mailman. 

For more information about Warsaw and GNU Mailman, you can read the full announcement here.

Community groups have been putting the revamped CitizenSpeak to work in a wide range of campaigns, from a Rhode Island effort to stop the siting of new schools on contaminated land to a multi-denominational offensive against religious intolerance in Indian River, Delaware.

For more information about Hotelling and CitizenSpeak, you can read the full announcement here.