And get this: The survey results for 2014, too!
The latest RISC OS Awards poll, covering 2018, came to a close on 10th May, with the results counted up not long after and revealed on the RISCOSitory Twitter feed.
It has unfortunately taken a bit longer than I’d hoped due to a number of personal issues, but the Awards website has now been updated to show the results, and the winners (for whom I have contact details) will be notified by email shortly, with direct links to the results so that they can be referred to on the their own websites.
The same format was used this year as last. With one exception, each category had up to six nominations, along with an option not to vote, and one to vote for something else (entering that alternative into the text field for the category). The one exception was the ‘Best overall contributor’ category, which just contained a text field so that people could vote for whoever they want.
After a round of discussions on the RISC OS Open forum, the CSV file containing the final nominations were run through a RISC OS program to set up the voting form – the poll went live. The other end of the process, counting the votes, was also dealt with on RISC OS, with another program used to parse the source data and create CSV files, which were then loaded into Fireworkz for final processing. A simple formula in Fireworkz was able to tell me either which of the main nominations won, or if I needed to look at the alternative options.
The poll itself was run later than intended, though slightly earlier than last year, and it also ran for a little longer at just under three months. The number of valid votes showed a small improvement over last year, at 120 compared to 106 – but it is still lower than it could be.
All of the nominations, together with the winner in each category, can be found on the Awards website 2018 results page.
As a side note, the survey results for 2014 have finally been processed and published. To save time, other than create charts I have done no analysis of the results, and simply published them as they are, with an indication of whether the percentage in each case has increased or decreased since the previous year.