New Zealander Penny Leach wins one of Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards

OSCON Co-Chair Allison Randal presented the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. From hundreds of nominations received, five individuals were selected to win a glass statue, along with a US$5000 cash prize in support of their Open Source development efforts.

This year's winners were:

- Penny Leach, Best Education Hacker for her work on Mahara and Moodle
- Brian Aker, Best Open Source Database Hacker for his work on Drizzle and MySQL
- Bruce Momjian, Database Jedi Master for his work on PostgreSQL
- Clay Johnson, Best Community Builder for his work with Sunlight Labs
- Evan Prodromou, Best Social Networking Hacker for his work on identi.ca and Laconica

New Zealander Penny Leach said in her blog "[I'm quite] overwhelmed by it. Looking back over the last 5 years I've been working on this Open Source Education stuff, there are so many people who have helped me out, inspired and motivated me, and I'm quite sure that this award is a recognition of all of the work of those people as well. The list is far too long to mention, but some of the people who stand out the most over the years are Andrew McMillan, Martín Langhoff, Richard Wyles, Martin Dougiamas, Eloy Lafuente, Nicolas Connault, Nigel McNie, and Heinz Krettek."

Penny worked from from 2004 to early this year for Catalyst in New Zealand, and now works fo Liip in Switzerland.