OpenUK celebrates contribution from the UK’s open source software community by recognising the service and expertise of a group of the UK’s top code contributors with our 2024 New Year’s Honours. These individuals we are recognising live across the UK in cities and rural areas and span all four UK nations. They have been identified as making significant levels of code contributions to open source code bases. Their contributions to the global tech sector and our digital world through their code contribution is part of the open source submarine powering the UK and global digital economies. We wish to celebrate their achievement.
As with OpenUK’s annual Honours each year, we could recognise many hundreds of individuals and this talented list that we celebrate are a drop in the ocean of those we could. If you feel you ought to be on this list but have not been asked pleased do not be disheartened as we are sure your time will come and each year more of our leading communities are recognised.
You can read more about the UK’s contributors – both those contributing code and those making other contributions – in OpenUK’s first annual State of Open Skills Report shared in November 2023. We are now capturing data about code contribution levels to open source and contributors across the UK quarterly.
We will update our 2023 first skills report with a second in November 2024. No other country in the world has analysed and is able to share its data in this way and it was heartening to see that 20.7% of contributions in the 12 months to 31 October 2023 were by first time contributors. Whilst they obviously do not make the Honours list in 2024 we hope that in years to come they will.
This Honours list – unlike our annual awards – has been created by OpenUK’s invite. Our awards are open to public nominations and 2024 nominations will launch in Q2. We have used data from GitHub, Gitlab and other sources, considering amongst other data commits and stars, to create a potential list which we have then selected from. OpenUK is grateful to Runa Capital and Onalytica, for partnering with us in mining and analysing data and in selecting the participants in our 2024 list.
Congratulations on your achievement and thank you each of you for your contribution to our digital futures.
The UK organisation for the business of Open Technology
