Help us celebrate our six-year anniversary on January 25 by voting in this year’s round of Opensource.com Community Awards.

The People’s Choice Award recognizes favorite Opensource.com contributors from 2015. We’ve selected several individuals who have made a significant impact—either by contributing multiple articles, or being involved in a story that resonated with our community and generated a big response. We’ve excluded previous winners, community moderators, and Red Hat associates from the list.

Voting closes on Wednesday, January 27. Be sure to go vote today!

2016 People’s Choice Award nominees

Kendell Clark

Kendell is an open source advocate and Fedora user who has been using Linux since August 2011. He is visually impaired and uses his experience to help others in need of accessible free and open source software tools. Read his Linux story, and see his tips for using Linux and improving accessibility in Accessibility in Linux is good (but could be much better), 8 accessible Linux distributions to try, and Improving accessibility for 8 open source projects.

Grant Ingersoll

Grant is the CTO and co-founder of Lucidworks, co-author of Taming Text (Manning Publications), co-founder of Apache Mahout, and a long-standing committer on the Apache Lucene and Solr open source projects. In 2015, he wrote The earnestness of being important, 3 big lessons I learned from running an open source company, 5 open source tools for taming text, and Getting started with open source machine learning.

Emma Irwin

Emma is the Community Education Lead at Mozilla. In 2015, she interviewed with Jen Wike Huger about Mozilla’s involvement in the Open Source Day codethon at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and she wrote Mozilla cares for community with educational resources.

Elizabeth Joseph

Elizabeth is an systems administrator at HP working on the OpenStack Infrastructure team, which runs the fully open source infrastructure for OpenStack development. In 2015, she wrote 10 entry points to tech (for girls, women, and everyone) and The benefits of building an open infrastructure.

Ben Kerensa

Ben is an internationally recognized open source evangelist, community manager, author, and speaker with experience in systems administration, project management, and open source development that spans a decade. In June 2015, he began penning his monthly Open Web column for Opensource.com. Find out more in his open source story, and learn about his new project, Glucosio.

Stu Keroff

Stu is a middle school social studies teacher at Community School of Excellence, a Hmong charter school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He leads a group of students called The Asian Penguins who take on projects aimed at improving people’s lives through the power of open source technology. In 2015 he wrote Asian Penguins middle school Linux club inspires community and Diversity enriches middle school Linux user group.

Heather Leson

Heather is a technology and community builder for global open source projects. As the program manager of social innovation for the Qatar Computing Research Institute, she supports numerous projects for humanitarian software deployments. In 2015, she wrote 11 ways to get involved with Humanitarian FOSS and Visualizing flux: Time travel, torque, and temporal maps.

Patrick Masson

Patrick is currently serving as the general manager for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). In 2015, he wrote about the OSI’s initiatives and how the community can get involved in 17 years of defending open source: Join the OSI today and Open Source Initiative launches free webinar series.

Ben Nuttall

Ben is the education developer advocate for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. In April 2015, he began penning the monthly Raspberry Pi column for Opensource.com. He also helped us break the news of the Raspberry Pi Zero: a $5 computer and wrote 5 great Raspberry Pi projects for the classroom for our 2015 Open Source Yearbook.

Radek Pazdera

Radek is a software engineer at Kano, a London-based startup. Contributing to our Beginners to Open Source series early in 2015, he wrote A developer’s guide to getting into open source. He contributed to our LinuxCon North America series with Teaching DevOps and open source to a new generation, to our LISA15 series with Why your manager loves technical debt (and what to do about it), and he wrote Navigating a sea of frontend frameworks for our All Things Open 2015 series .

Hugo Silva

Hugo is a researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações in Lisboa, Portugal and is a co-founder of PLUX for medical devices. In 2015, he contributed to the Open Hardware Connection community column for Opensource.com, beginning with The future of devices for health is not wearables. Hugo also contributed to our Open Hardware series with How to build a DIY heart and activity tracking device and 5 human-powered open hardware projects.

Al Sweigart

Al is a software developer and tech book author in San Francisco. He began writing for Opensource.com last year with Practical Python programming for non-engineers. He also contributed 6 tips for teaching kids to code, 6 time-consuming tasks you can automate with code, APIs, not apps: What the future will be like when everyone can code, and I am already a zygote. Is it too late for me to learn to program? (which includes a poll for readers).

Stephen Walli

Stephen is a technical executive, founder, consultant, writer, systems developer, software construction geek, and standards diplomat. In 2015, he wrote informational articles on Why OpenStack is different from other open source projects and The Open Container Project and what it means. He also contributed What does an adult look like in an open source community? and If we’ve won, why are we still explaining open source?. And he shares what he has learned in his more than 20 years of open source project support, foundation participation, and product engineering in Open source for products in four rules (and 10 slides).