GNOME nominated for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

Dear Foundation members,

I'm pleased to inform you that the Board has nominated GNOME for the
Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration:

  http://rit.mellon.org/awards

The submission looks as follows:

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The GNOME Foundation would like to nominate the GNOME Project for
participation in the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.
GNOME is a project to create a desktop environment for personal
computers based entirely on free software.  All of the software
produced by the GNOME Project is released under free software
licenses.

GNOME was the first such project to make a concerted effort in the
areas of usability, accessibility, and internationalization.
Usability means that we keep people in mind when designing our
software.  Accessibility means that physically disabled people can use
our software.  Internationalization means that people of different
languages, cultures, and writing systems can use our software.

The GNOME Project's software is widely used in the public and private
sectors in many countries, including schools and universities.  Spain
uses GNOME in the regions of Andaluc�and Extremadura, where an
estimated 400,000 students and teachers are able to use GNOME every
day.  The South Tyrol region in Italy uses GNOME for 16,000 students.
Macedonia uses GNOME in almost 500 computer labs in primary and
secondary schools.  India uses GNOME in about 2,800 schools, thus
serving 500,000 students.

GNOME's focus on usability has been a deciding factor for these
deployments:  GNOME understands that people should not need to be
computer experts in order to use computers.  Also, GNOME was the first
major free software project to support most of the world's written
languages, including those like Thai and Arabic which require
sophisticated text-handling functions.

Along with usability, GNOME has a commitment to accessibility, so that
physically disabled people can use their computers adequately.  GNOME
has built-in support for accessibility technologies such as Braille
readers and eye trackers.  No other software platform provides this
level of support for disabled people.

More recently, GNOME was chosen as the building platform for the 
One Laptop Per Child project, which intends to bring low-cost laptops
to primary students across the world.  GNOME is especially proud to be
part of OLPC.

In summary, we can say that the GNOME software is widely appreciated
as being useful for education, and it is actually used by hundreds of
thousands of students and teachers across the world!
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Now, everyone keep their fingers crossed :)

  Federico