PODCAST: The 2020 Noonies are Here and Even Greener than Last Year

Tune in (iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts) for a nine-minute briefing on this year’s biggest, greenest and most independent tech industry awards: Hacker Noon’s prestigious #Noonies!

The 2020 #Noonies are made possible by Amplify Brokerage, the world’s first global zero trading fee cryptocurrency trading platform. GET STARTED!

The original Noonies was conceptualized in early 2019, and it turned into something bigger than we at Hacker Noon could’ve ever imagined.

This year, we’ve 10x’d the thing (sorry - touchy phrase in tech these days, I know) and the New Noonies includes two new award categories, and over 100 new award titles. In this quick listen, Natasha runs you through this year’s Noonies selection process; a few of her favourite awards, and how nominations and voting will work this year. Enjoy!

See last year’s winners here.

NOMINATE: NOONIES.TECH 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hey there everybody you’re listening to the Hacker Noon podcast - how hackers start their afternoons - I’m Natasha, I manage editorial at Hacker Noon, and I am EXCITED.

Today: we launch the second annual Noonies - Hacker Noon’s annual tech industry awards, definitely the greenest industry awards out there, and no I’m not talking about the environment although we have awards for that too…

So today I’m going to spend twenty minutes maximum talking to you about: 

This year’s Noonies selection process,

The Noonies awards and nominees I’m most excited about this year, and 

How it’s all going to work.

Stay with me, get excited, and share this thing on all your socials when you’re done. 

BEFORE WE DIVE IN… A SPECIAL NOONIES SHOUTOUT to our headline sponsor, The Amplify Exchange Brokerage: the world’s first global zero trading fee cryptocurrency trading platform. Amplify Brokerage launched from the belief that cryptocurrency trading platforms in the market today are taking advantage of traders. Raising fees, instituting long lockup periods on interest bearing accounts, and relying on their monopolistic entity size to trap their traders, cryptocurrency exchanges needed to be redesigned from the ground up. Find out how Amplify is achieving exactly that, with their traders at the heart of every decision they make: https://amplifyexchange.com/  

When it comes to this year’s selection process, we were primarily focused on ways to make the Noonies more inclusive, diverse, and representative than last year. 

Which, is, unsurprisingly, still not an easy task, in tech today!

Which is why we need YOUR help, and why we’ve got a full one-month period of public nominations open before voting opens on August 13th. 

As a team at Hacker Noon, we’ve identified over 2,000 people and products we believe really deserve the recognition of being nominated for a Noonie this year. 

BUT: We’re hoping to 10x that number with this public round of nominations, and we’re looking forward to this opportunity to learn from each other, celebrate great work; start important conversations about what matters in tech today; and provide a platform for the people behind-the-scenes, those responsible for building our collective futures, so to speak, to be seen, heard and recognized for their contributions. 

Right, that covers selection - on to which awards I’ll be keeping a close eye on over the three month duration of this project.

We’ve not only quadrupled nominee numbers this year, but also added two award categories and over one hundred new award titles.

The five award categories are:

1. TECHNOLOGY,
2. DECENTRALIZATION,
3. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT,
4. FUTURE HEROES, and
5. BACK TO THE INTERNET. 

Out of respect for your time and attention, I’ve attempted the impossible and selected just a few really exciting award titles to share with you today, just to give you a taste of what’s happening over at noonies.tech. 

In the TECHNOLOGY category:

Some of our listeners might be interested to hear that the hotly contested, and later entirely hacked award for Social Network of the Year is back, though it’s hacked counterpart award for Most Exciting Startup has evolved this year to into a range of more specific award titles, like Most Promising Software as a Service startup, Creative Innovation of the Year, Founder of the Year, Best Startup CTO, and more. 

One of my favourites has to be the ever topical “WFH Innovation of the Year.” Among the internally nominated nominees: 

• DWELITO, which isn’t technically tech but these clever cats will deliver a mini-office to your door that you can assemble yourself and then theoretically set up anywhere outside of your home - provided you’re privileged enough to have the space, of course - and that’s a pretty smart idea, I’d say
• Watercooler which I guess lets you hang with your co-workers in a less super productive, Slack kinda way
• Spatial, which lets you collaborate with your colleagues in Virtual and Augmented Reality
• My ultimate favourite award from the tech category, however, is Hacker Noon’s New Contributor to Watch award, which features some really exciting founders and devs who are, as mentioned, new to the community but already adding so much value: one of whom, Benjamin Mmari is, I believe, in my home country, South Africa!

The next two categories are DECENTRALIZATION and SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, but since those are technically Utsav and Arthur’s areas of expertise I’ll skip straight to FUTURE HEROES.

When I thought of including this category, I was originally so on the fence about having the audacity to name it something so optimistic “In these unprecedented times..”, but David was all like hell yeah we need some heroes, so, here we are. 

This category is really for the people and projects that have helped us redefine what it means to make meaningful things in tech this year, and there are a number of nominees I feel deserve a big shoutout: 

Erwin Lima and Jarrett Dunn who have both been nominated for Mental Health Advocate of the Year - both of these great humans contribute so much of their personal time and energy to reminding all of us to vibe check ourselves on the regular - and in fact Erwin has written a book on smartphone addiction filled with really productive tips on how to manage it - and, you can read lengthy excerpts of it for free as always on hacker noon - search Lima Writes on hackernoon.com and you’ll see it all right there.

Nominated for the award of Best Use of Tech for Good, we already have some outstanding products like Goodnight Zoom, which pairs you with an isolated senior for storytime; Snapplify, a truly awesome initiative providing FREE access to educational textbooks; TLDRead, who takes research articles and uses Machine Learning to automatically summarize papers and mount them as a dashboard to provide a quick overview; and more.

I feel similarly passionate about the Back To The Internet award category, which houses such fun and impossible award categories as:

• Podcast Episode of the Year,
• Slack, Telegram, and/or Discord Channel of the Year, 
• Extension of the Year, 
• Newsletter of the Year, and, 
• Meme of the Pandemic. 
  

There’s so much worth getting into there… you’ll have to check it out for yourself - AND add your own nominees! 

Which brings us to the fun part of HOW THIS ALL WILL WORK: 2 things you need to know - 

Public nominations open today, Monday, 13 July. As aforementioned, nominations will be open for one month - which means VOTING will only open on 13 August, 2020. 

With regards to how voting will work when the time comes in August - you can find more details on the FAQ page of noonies.tech, but, spoiler alert - if you’ve published a story with Hacker Noon before, your vote counts more. Like, a lot more. 

Which means there’s still time to start publishing with Hacker Noon before voting opens. Just saying. 

Which is a nice segway to…… an important function of these annual Noonie Awards, celebrating our most read contributors. 

For those of you who might not know how Hacker Noon works: we’re an entirely crowdsourced publication in the sense that anybody can get published on Hacker Noon - under the review and support of our team of very human editors - and so our community of “writers” aren’t usually professional bloggers, or anything - they’re real people writing code and funding companies and founding startups.

They share what they learn with Hacker Noon because, well, publishing on Hacker Noon gives you mad street cred obviously, but also because they are personally carving out time in their schedules to contribute to industry standards, important conversations, technical knowledge… 

And we at Hacker Noon are super grateful that they do. So, in no particular order, a shout out to some of our most read writers, many of whom are nominated across more than one category -  thank you for your contributions!

• Javin Paul, 
• Daniel Jeffries, 
• Angelica Dietzel, 
• Sophia Martin, 
• Patrick Lee Scott,
• Limarc Ambalina, 
• Frederik Bussler, 
• Pirate Beachbum, 
• Kirill, 
• Ishan Pandey, 
• Adnan Rahić,
• Sandra Shpilberg…

And hundreds more. Check out noonies.tech to see them all, and nominate your own at noonies.tech!