Dewey Winburne Community Service Award Winners

2007 Dewey Award Goes to Shahed Amanullah

SXSW Interactive proudly salutes the winner of the 2007 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award -- Shahed Amanullah, Editor-in-Chief of altmuslim.com. Amanullah received this honor at a special ceremony on Tuesday evening, March 13 at the Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant in downtown Austin. The ceremony for the Dewey Award was held in conjunction with the annual Accessiblity Internet Rally (AIR) Interactive Competition as organized by Knowbility.

Altmuslim.com is a site which helps bring attention to various issues and stories that are often ignored by both the Muslim and western press. The site strives to provide an outlet for objective analysis using multiple sources of information and multiple viewpoints. Altmuslim.com also emphasizes introspective, as a way to challenge all of us to better our communities. Amanullah's role with this website is part of a worldwide effort -- associate editors are based in London, New York, Washington DC and Syndey, Australia.

Other 2007 Dewey honorees included Brenda Adrian (St. Edward's University), Donny Branam (Austin Student Digital Film Festival), Rodney Gibbs (Amaze Entertainment), Bobbie Guerra (Texas School for the Deaf), Kathy Keller (Texas Parks and Wildlife Department), Joyce Lauck (ageofaustin.org), Pat Pound (Governor's Committee for People with Disabilities), Harvey Smith (Midway Games) and Stefan Wray (savetexasaccess.org).

2006 Dewey Award Winner: Dale Thompson

In addition to her contributions to Freenet and the Austin community through the years, Dale Thompson received the 2006 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award 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 were 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.

Past Winners and Nominees

Past winners for this award are Roger Steele of the Austin Independent School District (2005), Janet Blake of True Light Day Care (2004), Teresa Ferguson of AIR-Interactive for the Arts and Jayne Cravens of the United Nations (2003), Sharron Rush of Knowbility (2002), Rachel Muir of Girlstart (2001), Dave and Jennifer Evans of Digital Voodoo (2000) and Dorothy Winburne (1999).

Past nominees of this award are Ilena Abounader, Stephen Amos, Bianca Bickford, Silona Bonewald, Dennis Borel, Gary Chapman, Jeanin Christensen, Perce Collins, Thea Eaton, Joe Faulk, Tiffany Galligan, Lisa Goldman, Danny Gomez, Mona Gonzalez, Steve Guengerich, Richard Halpin, Wendall Handy, Sheena Harden, Rondella Hawkins, Tim Harrell, Josie Hughes, Kat Jones, Karen Krepps, Jon Lebkowsky, Walter Lenoir, Herman Lessard, Adina Levin, Nick Lewis, Rich MacKinnon, Jan McSorley, Sheri Graner Ray, Monica Roesch, Chip Rosenthal, Keith Rutledge, Dave Sanders, Randi Shade, Trent Sharp, Ana Sisnett, Dr. John Slatin, Leroy Smith, Sharon Strover, Artis C. Street, Richard Yu, Adam Weinroth, Melvin White and Kevin Zeppernick.