At WiseWithData, we believe we can be and help support agents of positive change in our communities and around the world. We see Open Source Software (OSS) as a truly shining example of the power of global communities coming together to solve common challenges. Thanks to open source, people of all ages, races, ethnicities and incomes are able to read, learn, create and innovate on ever more accessible devices.
With this in mind, its with great pleasure we wish to announce the winners of our first annual WiseWithData ELEVATE Awards. Our staff have voted on charities, organizations, or people who have made a positive contributions to the world around them.
We are proud to announce the winners in 3 categories of awards:
Humanitarian Organizations of the Year
Ottawa Food Bank
The Ottawa Food Bank delivers over 14 tons of food each day to needy families in the Ottawa area. They grow, collect, purchase, sort and distribute food to help those in need.
Ottawa Mission
The Ottawa Mission is a place that offers a wide range of programs and services to address the ever-changing needs of people experiencing homelessness. They offer hope to people in the community who need it most.
OSS Organization of the year
Python Software Foundation (PSF)
WiseWithData uses Python every day for virtually all our development and delivery projects. By supporting PSF, we are helping them to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
OSS Contributors and Maintainers of the year
Erik Rose – Creator/Maintainer of Parsimonious Python Package
In creating Parsimonious, Erik developed a unique and powerful PEG parser for Python. It’s incredibly fast, efficient and simple to use. Parsimonious is at the foundation of our SPROCKET automated migration solution. Our SAS language parser is composed of over 250,000 lines of grammar entirely written in the Parsimonious grammar format. Even with a grammar this size and complexity, this PEG library has enabled our SPROCKET Robot engine to parse and generate PySpark equivalent code at over 1,000 lines of SAS code per second. Our biggest thanks to Erik and other contributors of the Parsimonious library.
Forest Fang – Creator/Maintainer of spark-sas7bdat 3rd party Spark plugin
Building on the great work of others, Forest built and maintains the spark-sas7bdat library, helping free SAS users from the shackles of the outdated and proprietary SAS dataset format. With this plugin, Spark users can now easily read SAS datasets for analytical processing in parallel, at speeds most SAS users can only dream of. We would like to offer our thanks and appreciation to Forest and the rest of the contributors to this library.
Each winner will receive a donation from WiseWithData. As we continue to grow, our commitment is to expand the ways in which we give back to our communities and invest to support ongoing innovation in the open source tools we use.