The annual RISC OS Awards poll, undertaken by RISCOSitory, is now open for votes.
The voting form went live a little over a week ago, and should remain available until the end of May at least, and provides you with the opportunity to vote for your favourite piece of hardware, the software you found most useful, the project you found most interesting, and so on.
For most categories, up to six items have been listed as initial suggestions, based on news as reported on RISCOSitory during 2020 – the year this poll is for – and then discussed on the RISC OS Open Ltd forum. You are able to choose one of those items, but if you feel something else deserves your vote, you can also specify that item instead.
These alternative options will be periodically detailed in posts on RISCOSitory, and included in the RISCOSitory Twitter feed.
There are two categories that don’t offer any options. The first of these, as previous years, is the Best overall contributor; please think about who (person or company) you feel deserves special recognition for something they’ve done for the platform – whether that’s work on the operating system itself, or for their efforts in organising an event, or benefiting the RISC OS community in any way. Who you vote for is entirely up to you.
The other category that follows this format this year is the Best show or event. This has changed from previous years, in which the main shows that took place were listed as options, and you could either vote for one of those or specify something else (perhaps a user group meeting). The pandemic changed things in 2020, with February’s Southwest Show being the only physical show that took place (and was also live-streamed), and the London Show in October being held as a virtual event, while at the same time user group meetings moved online and saw greater numbers of attendees discovering just how interesting the presentations given at them could be.
To reflect that there were just too many interesting events to choose from, therefore, the Best show or event category follows the same format as the Best overall contributor – consider the two shows you may have attended (or seen online) and all the user group meetings you’ve been able to attend, and decide which of them deserves this award.
This year also sees the addition of two new categories – Best internet or network connectivity software and Best development tool – with two more to be added for the next poll as well.
Each category also has a No opinion option – selected by default – for those cases where you feel you don’t have a valid opinion to offer.
The second part of the form is, as always, the annual survey, designed to get a picture of the RISC OS landscape, with questions asking about what hardware people are using, and the versions of the operating system they use, and so on – and, again, each question has a default option that allows the question to be skipped; so you can answer as many or as few of the survey questions as you like, or just skip it altogether.