Dewey Winburne Community Service Award

Dewey Winburne served as one of the original co-founders of what we now know as the SXSW Interactive Festival. Clearly, the event would not have made it to Year 13 without the vision, legacy, drive and energy he brought to those early years.

Teaching multimedia skills to teenagers, particularly teens of low-income and minority descent, was another great passion in Dewey's life. Many of the students who gained their initial new media training from him have gone on to achieve incredible careers in the local and national tech community.

The Dewey Winburne Community Service Award celebrates the vision that technology is society's most effective tool to level the playing field between the haves and the have-nots. Like the man whom it honors, the criteria for judging this prize is somewhat open-ended and fluid: candidates need to primarily live in the Central Texas area and be involved with a grass-roots effort to use convergent media to better the lives of this community's less fortunate citizens. Beyond these two stipulations, qualifications for this award are largely dependent on the skill sets of the nominees.

DALE THOMPSON WINS 2006 DEWEY AWARD

As announced on Sunday, March 12 at the Adobe Day Stage at the SXSW Interactive / Film Trade Show + Exhibition, the winner of the 2006 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award is Dale Thompson, the Financial Manager of Austin Free-Net.

Thompson received this award because of her contributions to Freenet and the Austin community through the years, but particularly for stepping into the role of volunteer recruiter and manager to provide computer access to recent Katrina evacuees in Austin. With the help of volunteers that she helped to recruit, Free-Net mobilized a system to put critical information on the web at a time when everything changed daily and FEMA, Red Cross family links databases, and web-based e-mail providers were overwhelmed and crashing every few minutes. Data entry volunteers worked round the clock while volunteers in the convention center evacuee living area worked shifts around public access computers. Thompson's crew fed data into the people-finder databases, helped set up and check e-mails for evacuees and even registered them for emergency assistance. Under her management, volunteers helped move and re-network computers and assisted city IT staff.

Lessons learned from this experience have been passed on to city managers and the huge corps of nonprofits serving the evacuees. Efforts continue to follow major concentrations of the evacuees in the area and create computer labs for them to continue to follow-up on their benefits requests and search for housing and jobs. Photo courtesy of Carl de Cordova.

2006 Nominees

Silona Bonewald
A technically-savvy political activist, Bonewald is the driving force behind the League of Technical Voters (www.leagueoftechvoters.org), a non-partisan project that hopes to lure more technical people into the political process, especially in relation to the use of technology by government.

Jeanine Christensen
Along with her husband Bill, Christiansen runs greenbuilder.com. This company specializes in web design for environmentalists and hosts green community-building components, including listservs for the Austin Sustainable Building Coalition, the Straw Bale Association of Texas, and the AustinEcoNetwork.

Thea Eaton
Eaton is a Flash developer with a mission -- to ensure that people with slow connectivity and / or disabilities can also enjoy the various Flash applications that make onine games and classes so fun and interactive. Her studio, Snert, focuses on accessible edutainment.

Joe Faulk
As the network / systems manager for the public computers of the Austin Public Libraries, Faulk oversees the use of 350 machines around the city that log 60,000 to 70,000 unique user sessions per month. His commitment to public access to computers and the Internet is without parallel.

Sheena Harden
The manager of the City of Austin Grant for Technology Opportunities (GTOPS), Harden identifies deserving community technology projects and provides them with matching funds. Now five years old, this program has flourished under her guidance, despite the variances in the tech economy.

Sheri Graner Ray
Considered the world's leading expert on gender equality in the games industry, Ray is author of "Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market." She believes that developing more games that appeal to women will lead to more women to enter technical computer industries.

Dave Sanders
Sanders is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Austin Independent School District. He is also on the Steering Committee for the Austin Student Digital Film Festival. His vision and support in these two programs have helped create countless numbers of innovative student projects.

Dr. John Slatin
Slatin founded the Accessibility Institute at the University of Texas to address the technology needs of people with disabilities. As a result of his efforts, a recent study found that UT's online materials rank as the nation's best as compared to other universities in terms of accessibility.

Dale Thompson
During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, a volunteer army of hundreds of techies provided assistance to evacuees who needed help with tasks such as setting up e-mail and registering with Red Cross and FEMA web sites. Thompson led the efforts of Austin Free-Net in coordinating the efforts of this tech army.

Richard Yu
Yu founded Box Populi, a company that trains and employs low income high school students to make, sell and maintain low-end computers made from donated / recycled computer parts. Once built, many of these computers go to under-served residents of the East Austin community.