Re: Mellon awards

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 17:37 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:

> http://rit.mellon.org/awards
> 
> The GNOME Foundation qualifies for these awards, surely.
> 
> Who would like to write a first draft of a (max. 1000 words) nomination?
> In my experience, the shorter the better, if you can do it in 200 words,
> that would be great. Please reply here with efforts.
> 
> We just need to figure out how the GNOME project provides a direct and
> demonstrably significant benefit to the arts or the environment.

[begin nomination]

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.  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.  It has
become one of the dominant desktop environments used in GNU/Linux
systems.

[contribution to the arts; this comes from http://www.gtk.org/success/]

GNOME allows custom software to be written, such as the National
Gallery's VIPS image processing system
(http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk), which is used in the VASARI project
for archiving and cataloging of artwork in museums worldwide
(http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~km/projs/vasari/).

[end nomination]