<p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;">We received some fantastic news this weekend by email. <strong><em>Our community service has been chosen to be one of the winners of the <a href="http://www.wsis-award.org">World Summit Award 2011</a>!</em></strong> It has been a long process for us as the original application to win the Finnish representation in this very big world wide competition was put in by the team almost one year ago to this date. We won the Finnish representation at the MindTrek conference held annually at Tampere, Finland, meaning that we were eligible to enter the global World Summit Award. I then decided that the judging date would also be our deadline for introducing a new look and feel to the website, a goal that was ultimately made possible by the contributions of many talented people from all over Europe.</p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;"><em><img alt="" src="http://www.renderfarm.fi/sites/default/files/acquia_prosper_logo_0.png" style="width: 361px; height: 157px; float: left;" /></em></p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;"><em>The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global activity to select and promote the world&#39;s best e-Content and most innovative ICT applications. It offers a worldwide platform for all who value the creative use of ICTs and who are committed to making today&rsquo;s information society more inclusive. WSA is based on a unique mechanism of a global contest supported by national selections of best practice and a sequence of content-focused national and international events, content conferences and promotional exhibitions.</em></p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;">WSA was initiated by Austria in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations&#39; World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and is organised by a global partner network, coordinated by the International Center for New Media. WSA partners come from governments, private sector and civil society in over 160 UN member states. WSA implements the UN agenda for the development of the information society and specifically supports the UN Millennium Development Goals of ending poverty, hunger and disease, providing education for all, saving the environment and giving a fair share to women through the use of ICTs.</p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;">Because of it&#39;s UN and Unesco backing, this for me personally felt like the competition I wanted us to win. The World Summit Award Grand Jury met in Hong Kong, SAR China, from April 8-14 bringing together eminent multimedia and e-Content experts from 32 countries. The jury evaluated over 460 entries, which were nominated from 105 UN member states to the global WSA. The jury selected the five most outstanding products in each of the eight WSA categories as winners. We we&#39;re one of the 40 lucky ones (belonging to the top 9%). Because of the pre-selection process that took place in each country, we could even speculate that at least a 1000 entries might have been put to the whole competition around the world. This in turn would place Renderfarm.fi in the top 4% of all entries. All this is, to put it simply, astounding.</p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;">We based our application to the judges on the fact that combining free and open rendering power available to everybody from almost anywhere on the planet with a free and open source 3D suite (Blender) is a combination that simply cannot be dismissed without giving it thought. Indeed we have come to strongly believe that the future of computing will see many more initiatives like ours, where computing power can be effortlessly exchanged between those who have it and those who need it. Many obstacles still lie on our wake to make the environment totally production ready, but with time and hard work we will be able to solve all issues and we as a community will be a part of a major AAA movie production. On a personal level I&#39;ve also come to believe that our strategy of embracing open values, as clearly expressed in our adoption of and support for open source frameworks (BOINC, BURP, Drupal and Blender to name a few), can only help us in reaching any goals we set for the future.</p><p class="rtejustify" style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>As always, thank you for your continued support - we couldn&#39;t achieve any of this without all of you volunteers! Champagne time! </em></strong></p>