Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 11th-15th AMIA Fall conference in Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’ and there are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA and e-cology.

Individuals can be nominated by themselves or others by sending a 500 word essay to ivaldes@hal-pc.org on why the individual nominated should receive the award. Please limit the essay to 500 words. The award will be given by a panel of judges to what they consider the most deserving nominee. This years award consists of the usual coveted plaque and $500. Suitable nominees are not limited to software engineers, but can also be projects, project leaders, academics, journalists, documentation writers and any others who have made significant contributions to open source medical software.

The award will be given at the November 2006 AMIA meeting in Washington, D.C. at a date and time to be announced. Attendance is not required to win the award. Deadline for nominations is July 30th, 2005.

Employees of Linux Medical News and their relatives are not eligible for the award. Posters to Linux Medical News who are not employed by Linux Medical News are eligible for the award.