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Top CiviCRM contributor receives open source award

Published
2016-10-31 05:33
Written by
josh - member of the CiviCRM community and Core Team member - about the Core Team

Long time contributor Eileen McNaughton recently won the New Zealand Open Source Award for Open Source Contributor, so we thought we’d reach out to a few members of the community to get input on her efforts with CiviCRM. Erik Hommel and Dave Greenberg are kicking off this blog post with their own personal thanks to Eileen. If you have a comment, story, or just want to say thanks, post it in the comments!

Thanks from Erik Hommel

I was really really happy last week to read that Eileen McNaughton won the NZ Open Source Contributor Award 2016. I can not compare to other open source projects as I only know the CiviCRM community really well, but man does she contribute! Always approachable on our communication channels, ready to help anyone in the community, fixing code, enhancing code and mothering most of the unit tests. There are times where I thought she had two lives at the same time until I read Harry Potter......Hermine Granger received that time-management thingy from Eileen! As part of a small team I had the pleasure of working closely with Eileen when we updated the CiviCRM API to version 3 (I did 2% of the work, Xavier Dutoit probably 18% and Eileen 80%.......). And it was fun! Working hard, discussions getting to the bottom of the stuff but also lots of jokes about warm beer and Marmite, culminating in a session at CiviCon London that we did together.

The impact Eileen had on the CiviCRM API and the Unit Testing was massive, it would certainly not be in the state it is today without her tender loving care! Her contributions are manifold and she thoroughly deserves this award. I believe the whole CiviCRM community will join me in saying that it if anyone should be awarded it would be Eileen. Thinking about Eileen always makes me smile....a passion for open source and non-profits, lots of good advice and common sense and a wonderful sense of humor!

Thanks from Dave Greenberg

I was super excited to hear that Eileen McNaughton had been honored with the New Zealand Open Source Award (NZOSA) for outstanding contributor to an open source project. Eileen brings a unique combination of passion, smarts, generosity, super-human energy, plain talk and a collaborative spirit to her work on CiviCRM. From her key role in establishing the LTS program, and her yeoman contributions in the challenging payment processing space, to her ability to hear and represent the voice of her users in making CiviCRM more useful and user-friendly - Eileen truly embodies the best of open source ideals. I hope the entire CiviCRM community will join in congratulating her on this much deserved recognition.

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Comments

No one deserves this more than you, Eileen. Enjoy the recognition. :)

I can also personally attest that Eileen has helped me and my clients countless times over the course of the years.

Eileen is great! Thanks for all your efforts. Civi wouldn't be nearly as good as it is without you.

Here's what I sent the NZOSA back in August, and every bit as true now:

"Eileen is far and away the strongest contributor to our community apart from full time core team members, and perhaps even including them. She submits more pull requests, reviews and commits more pull requests, helps other developers more, has been the maintainer of our Long Term Stable release for years, is a leader of our API team, assists on our security team, and helps with developer documentation. We all have great respect for her judgment, and are learning to live up to her high standards and constant requests for automated tests to be included with our pull requests.
 
"Although I have been delegating most development to my company's programmers in recent years, I was recently the first non-core team Release Manager for CiviCRM's June and July 2016 releases. I was amazed by the huge, constant, friendly and technically savvy engagement she displayed throughout the release cycles with PRs and contributors and reviewers. 
 
"CiviCRM is used by a number of leading open source projects, including the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) and the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/), as well as over 10,000 organizations around the world. Eileen makes a great difference throughout the CiviCRM codebase, and through CiviCRM, throughout the world.
 
"She is an exemplar for all of us in the open source world, and you couldn't ask for a nicer, better award winner."
Congratulations, Eileen, on your well deserved win! You're an inspiration.

 

Eileen is quite simply the driving force of our Community! No-one deserved this award more than she did.

Not only is Eileen by far the most prolific Community contributor, but she is also nurturing new contributors with advice and encouragements, reviewing most of the contributions that are submitted to the project, and pushing us all to improve testing in all  our contributions - whether by performing manual tests or including automated testing. And she always does this with plenty goodwill, kindness, and an uncanny humor ...

Huge congratulations and thanks to Eileen! We all owe you so much.

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Anonymous (not verified)
2016-11-01 - 14:03

I would like to add my congratulations to Eileen. Whenever I have had an issue Eileen points me in the right direction and I really appreciate her help.

Congratulations, Eileen!

I've had the pleasure of collaborating with you on a couple of modules, and it has been a joy. You seemed to have nailed the art of Getting Things Done while maintaining the desire to Do It Right. You are inspiring!