Launched the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award

Contents

What is the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award?

The Goals of the Award

Nominations and Winners

Prizes and Sponsors

How to Become a Sponsor?

Special Prize for the Winners of the Innovation Award Challenge

How can You Participate in the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award?

The Game Is On!

What is the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award?

JavaScript became a very popular language with a growing importance even outside the Web browser where it originally started gaining relevance.

This is due to the fact that more and more developers have been creating and publishing JavaScript components for all sorts of purposes.

As the JavaScript developer community grows, there will be developers that will create components for purposes that overlap others that already exist.

This is OK but it would be better if developers focused on using their creativity to solve new problems or solve known problems with different approaches.

Innovation is the basis of the progress. Therefore the JS Classes site is announcing today the official launch of the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award.

The Goals of the Award

The JavaScript Programming Innovation Award is based on a similar award that goes on the PHP Classes site since 2004, except that it is to encourage the submission of innovative PHP components.

There the main idea was to discourage the submission of more components for the same purposes as the ones previously submitted by other developers, in favor of new components that solve problems not addressed before.

The main goal of these awards is to stimulate the creativity as a means to encourage developers to bring new solutions for problems that other developers may also have.

Once developers get the spirit and engage on the innovation cycle, the site will be more useful to the community and the community will be more motivated to submit even more innovative components, thus leading to a never-ending cycle that benefits mainly the community as a whole.

Nominations and Winners

This award works on a monthly basis. By the end of every month the innovative components published in that month will be nominated by a site moderator. In the next month the users will vote on one of the nominees. In the following month the results are announced in the winners page. A special newsletter goes out to announce the winners to the whole site community.

Each nominee will earn points starting from the winner. The winner will get a number of points equal to the number of nominees. The second place gets 1 point less than the winner. The third place gets 2 points less, and so on.

The site builds a ranking of participants by adding all points that each got and then sorting them by which got more points. There is also a ranking of countries that is based on the points that all participants of each country got.

There is also an annual ranking by individual participants and by country. As the time passes, all these rankings will be displayed in the winners page as a sort of hall of fame.

Prizes and Sponsors

The main prize that each participant gets is the personal distinction for the submitting innovative contributions that the users of the site appreciate. The submissions of nominees and winners will be also commented every month in the Lately in JavaScript podcast.

But there is more. Every person likes a little treat. Therefore, thanks to our sponsors the award will also give away prizes of interest of the JavaScript developers.

Every nominee may be entitled to a prize. Starting from the winner, each nominee may pick one of several prizes provided by sponsors.

All nominees may get prizes as long as there are enough sponsors providing prizes for all of them. In case there are less sponsors then prizes, only the first nominees will get to choose a prize.

The award is just starting. So far we already signed up 3 sponsors. I would like to welcome all of them for their interest and enthusiasm to sponsor these awards:

Packt Publishing

Publisher of many books of specific topics including some of JavaScript

WebDev Publishing

Publisher of the JSMag JavaScript magazine and other magazines

O'Reilly Media

Publisher of many books of technology and has been a long time support of developer communities, user groups and organizer of great events.

Talking about great events organized by O'Reilly, this year they are organized a nice event named FluentConf focused on HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS 3. It will happen in May 28-30. Take a look at the site of the event as you may want to not waste the chance to attend.

Sponsors Prizes One book of choice by Packt One year subscription to the PDF edition of the JSMag magazine One downloadable e-book of choice by O'Reilly

How to Become a Sponsor?

More sponsors will be joining soon once the negotiations are finished. Currently the PHP Programming Innovation Award has 12 sponsors. There is no reason the JavaScript award does not reach a similar number of sponsors.

If you are in charge of a company that develops products of interest for JavaScript developers, please contact the site so you learn more about how to become a sponsor.

Special Prize for the Winners of the Innovation Award Challenge

The JS Classes site was launched in 2010 but only now the innovation award is being started. That was due to the fact that initially most classes were innovative when compared to the few that existed in the site. Any nominations then would not really distinguish their authors, as practically all classes would be considered innovative.

The site would need to reach a significant number of contributions so it can start distinguishing those that are really innovative. It was established in 2012 that the minimum number of submissions to start the award should be 200. Once 200 submissions were reached, the innovation award would be started. That just happened last December.

The site started a special challenge during 2012 to encourage the contributors to reach that goal faster. The top 5 developers that submit more notable classes until the award starts would be entitled to a special prize: an elephant plush toy that is the mascott of the PHP Classes site.

So now it is time to announce the 5 winners of the challenge. I would like to congratulate Dixan Santiesteban, Arturs Sosins, MarPlo, Mark Rolich and martin barker. The site is in touch with these winners to get your address and deliver the prize. If you do not get an e-mail from the site regarding that until the end of this week, please contact the site as soon as possible.

I also would like to thank all the other contributors that sent many other notable classes but did not reach the top 5. I hope you continue to send great contributions, this time to be nominated for the innovation award and get more recognition and other prizes.

A special thanks to Arturs Sosins for having suggested this initiative to encourage other developers to reach the challenge goal faster, so the innovation award starts sooner. It really worked wonderfully as an encouragement and the goal to start the innovation award was reached.

How can You Participate in the JavaScript Programming Innovation Award?

So now all you need to do to participate is to submit your innovative JavaScript classes and wait for their nomination by the end of the month.

First, if you do not yet have a site account, you can create one very quickly. To make it faster you can login using your account in Facebook, Google (Gmail, etc.), Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail, etc.), StackExchange (StackOverflow, etc.), or GitHub.

Then just go to the contribute page and add a package. Then you can upload your package files individually, or better, import all files at once from a version control repository with a few clicks. The site supports version control repositories based on Git, SubVersion or CVS.

Once you have submitted your packages, just wait for a moderator to review what your code does and publish it as soon as possible.

Meanwhile you can do other things that can help making your project more visible by going through a system of levels of missions that guide you through a series of steps that increase your classes awareness in a fun way.

The Game Is On!

So that's it, the JavaScript Innovation Award is started! If you have innovative JavaScript components to share, please go ahead and start contribution now.

The site will be announcing other great initiatives throughout the year that will make sharing your JavaScript components in the JS Classes site even more interesting and fun. Keep watching this blog.

If you would like to make any comment or ask a question, feel free to post a comment to this article here.