WordPress is excited to announce that Openverse has been awarded the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category!

The Open Education Awards for Excellence, organized by the non-profit organization Open Education Global (OEG), celebrate people, resources, and initiatives that have significantly contributed to the open education field and community. This year, they received 172 nominations across 16 award categories, representing individuals and projects from 38 countries.

This award honors Openverse’s work to make it easy for everyone to discover and use open educational resources. The award reviewers were particularly impressed by Openverse’s one-click attribution feature. Moreover, they highlighted the tool’s ability to filter searches by source collections and other parameters, such as image orientation and specific license, which they noted “provides seekers of open content important affordances to find clearly licensed media they can reuse.” 

“This is an exceptional search engine for the open education community. The one click attribution copy for images makes attribution very straight-forward and easy, even for novice users. The design is excellent; the results are returned fast.”

Award reviewer for the 2023 OEG Award for Open Infrastructure

This recognition not only underscores Openverse and WordPress’s commitment to open content but also celebrates the work of their dedicated contributors, community, and partners in advancing open education and creative works.

Learn more about this Openverse award on the OEG page.

Congratulations, Openverse!

CMX is one of the largest professional organizations dedicated to community builders. The awards were open to public nomination, and finalists were chosen by panels of their peers in the CMX community.

Andrea has been a vital community strategist for the WordPress project since 2011. Her work to build and support a vibrant community has played a part in the success around the popular open source CMS. Her work is sponsored by Automattic, where she leads a team that focuses on educational efforts, funding, and in-person community-driven events that serve a global base.

Josepha has been the Executive Director of the WordPress project since 2019. Her work to coordinate and guide volunteer efforts spans 20 teams and involves thousands of volunteers. Her work is also sponsored by Automattic, where she leads the open source division that focuses on all aspects of open source contribution including design, development, volunteer engagement, and the health of the overall WordPress ecosystem.

Votes are Open

Final recipients are chosen with open voting — if you feel like either Andrea or Josepha have had an impact on your careers, your trajectory in the WordPress project, or the health of WordPress as a whole, there are three ways you can show your support:

• Stop by and vote for them (Andrea here, Josepha here)!
• Share this post with your own communities!
• Tweet some inspirational thoughts about your time/experience/learnings with WordPress (using #WordPress, naturally)!

Thank You Notes

A lot of care and passion goes into making the WordPress Project as fantastic as it is. I think these awards are a reflection of how wonderful the community and ecosystem are, and I appreciate everyone’s continued trust in my stewardship!

Josepha Haden Chomphosy

WordPress community organizers are some of the most generous and creative people in the world — working with them is exciting and interesting every day. I’m humbled by this nomination; thank you!

Andrea Middleton

We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.

We don’t want WordPress to develop a reputation.