OpenUK New Year’s Honours
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.