Judges
Helen and the Judging sub-committee have been hard at work sourcing judges to evaluate the hundreds of entries that will come in.
With entrants from all states of Australia, the job of judging is going to be bigger and more difficult than ever. The current judges for the 2010 Australian Web Awards are:
Australians
- Dmitry Baranovskiy, Sydney
- Gary Barber, Perth
- Sonja Bernhardt, Brisbane
- Nathanael Boehm, Canberra
- Ben Buchanan, Sydney
- Warren Duff, Perth
- Simon Eder, Perth
- Ruth Ellison, Canberra
- Jessica Enders, Perth
- Penny Hagen, Sydney
- Nic Hodge, Sydney
- Keith Lang, Canberra
- Duncan Riley, Melbourne
- Russ Weakley, Sydney
- Gian Wild, Melbourne
- Ben Winter-Giles, Canberra
- Jeremy Yuille, Melbourne
Internationals
- Mike Brown, New Zealand
- Leslie Doherty, USA
- April Garvey, USA
- Chris Mills, UK
- Brandy Shapiro-Babin, USA
- Nicolas Steenhout, New Zealand
From time to time judges will have conflicts of interest, these are made public for better transparency.
Dmitry Baranovskiy
Dmitry has over ten years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design. These days he spends his working hours as Software Architect at Sencha.
He is also the creator of Raphaël, the JavaScript Library, as well as a Optimus, the Microformats transformer. At any given moment he is always working on three secret projects, though no one knows where he gets the time for any of this.
Dmitry is on Twitter as @dmitrybaranovsk.
Gary Barber
Gary Barber is the principal user experience consultant at radharc with a focus usability, interaction design and information architecture. He is a realistic standardista, with 15 years experience in the web industry, who is constantly mentoring and exercising his passion for creativity, usability, accessibility and minimalist user experiences.
Gary currently works with not-for-profits, government agencies and medium to large business all with an aim to make the web a more usable place. He also rants wildly on these subjects on this blog - man with no blog.
He is currently the main cat herder for Perth Port80 and is on the Judging Sub-Committee for the Australia Web Awards. When he’s not doing all this he can be found rock climbing or taking photos.
Gary is on Twitter as @tuna.
Sonja Bernhardt
Sonja Bernhardt has more than 20 years experience in the technology industry and over a decade of active involvement in judging award programs, Sonja brings significant background and experience to the judging table, in particular her reality and reason philosophy, enquiring mind and focus on a good user’s web site experience brings value.
Sample judging experience includes:
- Overall Chair of the Australian Judging Panels for the Asia Pacific ICT Awards
- Australian representative on the International ICT Awards Judging Panel
- One of a select group of judges in the prestigious 2002 World Congress "Secrets of Australian IT Innovation" Awards
- Judge in numerous WiT (Women in Technology) awards, including American based Anita Borg Institute Technology Awards
- Judge in the prestigious National “Secrets of Australian IT Innovation” Competition
- Chief Judge for Queensland in the Australian Institute of Project Management - Project Managers Awards
- Judge on prior Web Awards.
Nathanael Boehm
Nathanael Boehm is a Canberra-based user experience designer specialising in web interaction design and social media.
Since the start of his career as a web application developer in 2000 he has developed websites and web applications for a long list of large organisations including the Department of Defence, Australian Federal Police, Qantas, Optus, ANZ, Australian High Tech Crime Centre, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Centrelink and more.
He is also involved in the Government 2.0 initiative in Australia with his participation in Public Sphere and the Government 2.0 Taskforce in 2009, his involvement in OpenAustralia since 2008 and his work as a Federal Government employee in social media and advocacy for participatory democracy and citizen-centric service design.
Mike Brown
Mike is a co-founder of Webstock. He is also one of the creators of FullCodePress and of the ONYAs - awards for New Zealand's web industry.
Along the way, he has actually done hands-on website work, focusing on front-end development, information architecture and user experience. He still thinks it's magic when stuff appears in a web browser!
Mike's favourite artist is Bob Dylan. His favourite drink is red wine. He dreams occasionally of cycling around the world.
Ben Buchanan
Ben Buchanan started creating web pages 14 years ago, while completing a degree in everything but I.T.
He worked on three generations of Griffith University's corporate website and redeveloped masthead News Limited sites including The Australian. He was also the Frontend Architect for the ground-up rebuild of News Digital Media's CMS, which powers the metropolitan mastheads, The Australian and news.com.au.
He now works as a Frontend Developer for Atlassian and writes at the 200ok weblog.
Leslie Doherty
Leslie is known for criticism of literally expression on the web, while working late at night with a pet lizard on car engines.
Warren Duff
Warren was appointed to CEO of ineedhits.com in August 2008, after joining the company in 2002. ineedhits.com is a Search Engine Marketing company specializing in assisting small to medium businesses all over the world promote their businesses on Google, through Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click services.
During his time with ineedhits, Warren has played a strategic role in various capacities including COO and Business Development Manager.
His primary goal as CEO is to continue the company's clear vision and direction to further assert itself as a leader in the global SME search marketing environment, by continually developing the people, processes and products at the heart of the business.
Warren attends the major industry conferences and seminars, ensuring that his knowledge of the industry and marketplace is up-to-date. He has been invited to speak or be a panellist at a number of industry conferences.
Warren has a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering – Computer Systems Engineering, from Curtin University of Technology and is a graduate of the Microsoft PTY Intern Program. Warren has several years of experience in customer service and enterprise levels sales.
Simon Eder
Simon Eder is a front end web developer and founder of - Oolybooly.com.au. He is an experienced and engaging presenter hosting workshops on the topics of website design and planning, search engine optimisation and social media marketing for small business. Simon has managed a web department for a Perth company and spent 8 years teaching Certificate IV Web Design students at Central Tafe.
Although mostly obsessed with stunningly beautiful and usable websites he is passionate about educating business owners on the potential and pitfalls of the wild web.
Ruth Ellison
Ruth Ellison is a user experience practitioner and information architect living in Canberra. She is extremely passionate about designing for inclusive and useful user experiences. She is fascinated by the psychology of design and the way humans interact with technology. Ruth currently works at Stamford Interactive on many interesting Government and private sector projects.
When not busy with design and accessibility work, Ruth can be found exploring graffiti and street art through the lens of her camera, helping to organise TEDxCanberra, BarCampCanberra and a number of other events, as well as sharing her love of robots. Ruth can occasionally be found blogging at ruthellison.com
Ruth is on twitter as @RuthEllison.
Jessica Enders
Jessica Enders is Principal of Formulate Information Design, an Australian business providing form design consulting services to government agencies, companies and not-for-profits.
Jessica has designed forms—in paper, on the desktop and on the web—for some of Australia's most influential organisations including Wesfarmers, SEEK, Origin Energy, GE Money, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
In 2009 Jessica was named Canberra BusinessPoint Emerging Entrepreneur and in 2010, an insurance quoting and purchasing interface, which Jessica designed for Kmart Tyre & Auto Service Get a quote, won the international Pegasystems "Customer Experience Transformation" award, beating many big names in the industry such as Zurich, American Insurance Group and ING.
Formulate's aim is to fix users' frustration by creating efficient, effective and user-friendly forms. Jessica knowledge, skills and experience extends to all aspects of a form's design, including the way questions are asked, the layout of the form and the business process and workflow that surrounds it. She looks forward to playing an active role judging the Australian Web Awards, and hopes to see some great forms!
April Garvey
April Garvey combines over 13 years of online consumer marketing successes from a diverse range of organizations such as Wall Street giants Citibank and GMAC, digital pioneers Kanoodle.com and Etrade.com, and most recently international software giant Rosetta Stone, where April directed online marketing and web strategy in the US, UK, DE, and JP.
April has first-hand experience working on both the online retail side as well as experience developing advertising networks on the publisher side. She served as Vice President of New Product Development for Kanoodle.com, a pioneer in search-targeted sponsored links. Today, April leverages this insider experience to help advertisers intelligently grow their online business while mitigating the high risk of fraud inherent with advertising networks and affiliate partnerships
April holds degrees in Marketing (BA), Instructional Technology (MA) and her MBA. She is currently acting as President & Founder of an online consulting company called Web By Numbers, located just outside of Dulles, VA, alongside AOL, Network Solutions and Omniture/Adobe.
Penny Hagen
Penny is a Design Strategist with over 10 years experience delivering design projects and design training in Australia and New Zealand. With a background in interface and interaction design Penny is an experienced practitioner of human-centred-design approaches and combines hands on design experience with a knowledge of emerging design research methods.
Penny is currently completing a PhD in participatory design methods for social technologies at UTS in Sydney. Prior to this latest research adventure Penny worked as the Projects Director/Strategist at Digital Eskimo guiding the user experience design process, overseeing production of a range of sites, services and social action initiatives and driving their experimental design research program.
Nic Hodge
A Professional Geek for Microsoft, Nick has over 23 years of IT industry experience in a variety of sales, technical, management, marketing and strategic roles. As a sought-after presenter, prolific social networker and a closet workaholic, Nick just loves technology. Especially software technology.
"Online" since 1987 and before the web, subsequently working with Internet technologies more years than there have been browsers, Nick has a strong belief that the current revolution of connection, collaboration and communication is going to have dramatic and unforseen effects on the human condition. Some call this hyperconnectivity.
Keith Lang
Keith Lang is an Interaction Designer at Skitch.com. He's best known for his previous work within plasq on products including the Award-Winning 'Comic Life' comic creation application. Recent work includes UI and interaction design for Jigsaw Junior, an iPad puzzle application for kids.
You can find out more at uiandus.com where Keith writes on topics including; the application of Cognitive Psychology to Interaction design, motion and animation in design, new and upcoming hardware interfaces and the history of Interaction Design.
Chris Mills
Chris Mills works for Opera (the Viking web browser vendor), evangelizing open web technologies, testing nascent standards (such as CSS3 and HTML5) and heading up Opera’s education activities. He publishes regular design and development articles on dev.opera.com, and is the creator of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. He is also one of the core members of the Open Web Education Alliance, a W3C incubator group that aims to develop a worldwide standard for web design and development education.
He is co-author of the book InterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design.
Outside of work, Chris is a metal warrior, playing really fast drums in the mighty Conquest of Steel. He lives in Oldham, in the Northwest of England, with Kirsty, Gabriel, and Elva, and too many computers.
Duncan Riley
Duncan Riley is a writer, publisher, speaker and blogging evangelist. After many years online, including stints authoring politically focused websites he discovered the then new blogging in 2002, founding The Blog Herald which went on to become a Top 100 blog worldwide at the time. In 2005 he co-founded the b5media blog network, a company now based in Canada that took $8 million US in Venture Capital funding.
Duncan has a diverse background. Having started in merchant banking in Sydney in the mid 1990’s he’s had stints in Management and as a staff member to a Federal Member of Parliament.
Duncan left b5media in late 2006 and spent 12 months writing for the tech blog TechCrunch.
In May 2008, he founded The Inquisitr, a site that takes up most of his time today. As of May 2010, The Inquisitr received over 1 million unique visitors a month, reading nearly 6 million pages.
Brandy Shapiro-Babin
Brandy Shapiro-Babin is Co-Founder of webmasterRadio.FM, the world's largest online radio network for the B2B marketplace and AffCon2010.com, the premier event for affiliate and performance marketing arena and the only conference series where affiliate and performance marketers attend for free. The conference series is held twice yearly and offers unparelled education and networking opportunities.
Shapiro-Babin background is in business development and public relations and brings years of success working with companies to help them maximize their earning and growth potential, with a special focus on non-traditional revenue. Shapiro-Babin has been on both the client and vendor side of product development and promotion, and it is with this diverse background that she successfully guides her clients to success. Previously, Shapiro-Babin was Director of Public Relations for Tinsley Advertising and worked with companies including; Southwest Airlines, SunBeam Inc, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Clear Channel Communications, Paxson Communications, Silicon Graphics, ValueClickMedia, MSN, Google, Yahoo!, and many other industry leading organizations. Additionally, Shapiro-Babin is very active in the community and held the post of acting Executive Director of Cars for Cancer, benefiting the American Cancer Society and Board of Directors for the Boys and Girls Club and Mental Health Association of South Florida.
Like her partner and husband, Shapiro-Babin strives to do something proactive and effective each day to help the world around her. She is very passionate about the work she does and proud to be aligned with some of the most respected names in the business community.
Nicolas Steenhout
Nicolas Steenhout is a person with a disability who has been an advocate for disability rights and accessibility both online and in the "real world". His interest in web accessibility began in the mid 1990's when a blind friend of his was talking about the issues with images on the internet, mostly without alternative text.
Nic has been active in FOSS development. He was involved as a core team member in the Joomla! CMS as well as later working on Mambo. He uses a variety of open source web based applications - "the best tool for the job" is a mantra he believes in.
When he is not doing online "stuff", Nicolas enjoys food and photography, and combines both online on a recipe/culinary website.
Russ Weakley
Russ has worked in the graphic design arena for over 20 years with extensive experience in real world CSS. He has also produced a series of widely acclaimed CSS-based tutorials.
He is also internationally recognised for his presentations and workshops on web development, standards and accessibility.
Gian Wild
Gian Wild is the Manager of Usability and Accessibility Services within the ITS Web Centre at Monash University.
Gian was a Member of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group from May 2000 to August 2006 (with two notable absences). She remains actively involved in WCAG2, having recently served on the taskforce dedicated to addressing the cognitive disability formal objection raised by Lisa Seeman. With other members of the accessibility industry in Australia Gian also liaises with the Australian Human Rights Commission on the status of WCAG2.
She recently completed a peer review of the alternative accessibility guidelines, the WCAG Samurai Errata. Gian is a regular presenter of seminars across Australian on accessibility issues.
Ben Winter-Giles
Ben is the Senior and founding partner of Kata Professional Pty Ltd. Ben has over 16 years of experience from a very wide selection of Federal Government and non-government agencies and organisations.
Ben is an Industrial Designer by trade, and through that he developed a keen passion for making things actually work well for humans. Among his other passions are health and fitness, body art, horses, and landscape / nature photography.
A Designer at heart, who's made a career of drawing pictures and talking a lot, Ben uses a very 'hand made' approach to design and is often spotted with his large A3 sketch pad and a bunch of pencils in hand at meetings.
Ben is somewhat of an analogue designer for a digital world, and this lends itself to a certain simplicity and human feel to the design solutions he works with. You can find Ben in all the usual internet lurks, twitter, facebook, and of course through Kataprofessional.com.au
Ben can be found on twitter as @wintergiles.
Jeremy Yuille
Jeremy Yuille is an interaction designer, digital media artist and academic with a background in digital art, music, performance and architecture.
He has a Bachelor of Design Studies from the Architecture department of the University of Queensland and a Masters of Design from the Spatial Information Architecture Lab at RMIT University.
Jeremy is a co-founder of the Media and Communication Design Studio at RMIT, where he undertakes collaborative research with the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), supervises postgraduate students, and holds interaction design studios. He is also a certified scrum-master, and has been a director of the Interaction Design Association.