Staff Corner: Thanking community members for their contributions – Hyperledger Foundation

Our community is strong and growing thanks to hundreds of community leaders around the world. We recently got back from Hyperledger Global Forum 2022 in Dublin where the strength of our community was displayed in force. While we were there, we had the opportunity to recognize our community members in a number of fun (and hopefully meaningful) ways. 

This year, on the main stage, we announced the winners of our annual Community Recognition Awards:

This year’s honorees were:

• Daniel Szegö, DLT Advisor, CBDC Think Tank Budapest – Recognised for hosting the most meetups of any organizer this year and doing events in three languages, In addition, he also actively brings community members together around Hyperledger Fabric and Kubernetes projects
• Josh Kneubuhl, IBM Research, IBM – Recognized for his cross project and lab collaboration with the Hyperledger Fabric community.
• Arun S M, Staff Software Engineer, Walmart Global Tech India – Recognized for his active role in welcoming new community members on Discord and as one of the leaders of the Hyperledger India Chapter.
• Char Howland, Software Engineer, Indicio – Recognized for her active role in the Hyperledger Aries/Identity community, including running the identity implementers calls and welcoming new members to that growing community.
• Nicko Guyer, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Kaleido – Recognized for being very active on Discord and Github and very good at onboarding new people into the Hyperledger FireFly community.
• Andrew Whitehead, Senior Software Architect, Portage CyberTech – Recognized for being an active Hyperledger Aries contributor who helps with onboarding new people and does a lot of work on security.
• Antoine Toulme, Senior Engineering Manager, Splunk – Recognized for being extremely responsive on the Hyperledger Besu channels as well as contributing workshops and more.
• Marcos Sarres, Director Executivo, GoLedger – Recognized as a co-lead our Hyperledger Brazil Chapter and organizer of many very well received meetups for the community this year.
• Vipin Bharathan, Principal Consultant, dlt.nyc – Recognized for running the Identity WG, serving as the Chair of our Financial Services SIG and doing so much to welcome others into our community.
• Peter Somogyvari, Software Product Architecture Manager, Accenture – Recognized for always making the time to onboard and help new community members, taking on multiple mentees through our mentorship program and so much more.

Hyperledger Foundation Executive Governing Board Chair David Treat, Executive  Director Daniela Barbosa and Senior Director of Community Architects David Boswell join Community Recognition Awards recipients Marcos Sarres of GoLedger, Arun S M of Walmart Global Tech India, Vipin Bharathan of dlt.nyc, Nicko Guyer of Kaleido and Josh Kneubuhl of IBM  on stage at Hyperledger Global Forum 2022 in Dublin.

Daniela Barbosa presents Community Recognition Awards to Accenute’s Peter Somogyvari and Splunk’s Antoine Toulme

Throughout the event, we were also handing out small pieces of swag to thank the community members who were there. Taking the time to travel to the event and spend multiple days meeting and talking with others is an important contribution attendees were making to the health of the Hyperledger community. We wanted to recognize them for their time, effort and commitment.

One of the items we were giving out were Hyperledger coins that said “Community Code Collaboration Contribution” on the back and had 2022 on the front. Since the event this year was being held in Dublin, we designed the coins to have the two color look of a 2 euro coin.

We started making coins to thank community members – an idea long championed by our current TOC Chair, Tracy Kuhrt – in 2021. People seemed to like them so we wanted to do it again this year. It also seems fun to have an ongoing series of coins that change each year that people can collect to show how long they’ve been active in the community. We don’t know what a 2023 coin would look like yet, so feel free to send us suggestions.

For special occasions, we’ve also engraved the coins for some of the technical leaders in the community. Check out this video of a coin being engraved by a laser for Danno Ferrin, our TOC Vice Chair:

There are many other ways to recognize people for the contributions they make – one of Ry’s personal favorites is a comment in the NTPd source code. At the Hyperledger Foundation, we’ve also issued badges, given poker chips for events and other contributions, published Developer Showcase blog posts and have made stickers and shirts.

Different ways to recognize people will be relevant for different people. Some people may want a coin or shirt and others may not. We’re interested to hear what sort of recognition is important to you so we can make sure what we do is meaningful. Please send us your thoughts (email community-architects@hyperledger.org). And, if you’d like to earn a coin, a token, a badge or anything else, get involved in the community, and we’ll be happy to thank you for your contributions.