If you haven’t already seen my tweets from last week, you might not know we won the presitigious Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Award (APSEA) in the category of Sustainability & Environment for our work with Climatewatch.  In any event, I was really surprised when they announced us as the winner.

(In case you were wondering, we’re waiting for SSSI and SIBA to publish that it was Gaia Resources who applied for this award – somehow they managed to put in our client as the award recipient)

The official booklet said: 

“This is an excellent example of how the public be engaged in the new and emerging area of ‘citizen science’. Climate Watch democratises science by using web and spatial technologies – that are now considered a part of mainstream – in a way that maximises public engagement. It is an excellent example of the use of open-source software in a production environment.”

So as I acknowledged in my short, off-the-cuff (and totally unprepared) acceptance speech, this award was the product of many people involved in the project, especially the team of developers and GIS professionals who have been involved since we started with the project four years ago.

It was great to win not only the WA award in this category, but also to win the international version of this award.  It certainly indicates that we areon the right track with our work – especially to win an award for a project with open source software in it!

I’ll post more on my recent two-week trip to Canberra (and some more dodgy acceptance photos) over the coming days.

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Late edit: Here’s an approrpiate happy snap!