The Neos CMS Awards 2024

As we said, we want to award the "Best Neos or Flow Project". Technical excellence is the baseline - but not the crucial point that will decide on whether a project will receive an award or not. 
We want to especially honor projects that bring forward the Neos Project, contribute to open source and stand as a role model for innovation.

What is a project?

A project can be considered almost every software that is based on or clearly related to Neos or Flow (such as a website, an online-shop, a package, an IDE plugin or an app, also in collaboration with other communities) and can be shown and explained in a video, can be technically evaluated and that can be shown in terms of impact, innovation and contribution. Packages need a good README, should be well maintained and usable for others. 

What do we look at technically?

Since we cannot look into your source code (and in many cases are not allowed to for legal reasons), we have to judge those technical aspects by what you write and show in your submission and by what we can judge from frontend and/or backend. Make sure we can evaluate the following aspects by providing us the correct information.

• Performance & SEO (e.g. Lighthouse, Online Visibility Scoring and others)
• UI/UX for users/visitors (We need to know the target groups for your project)
• Adherence to Neos best practices
• Underlying technical stack
• Privacy - what is being tracked and how

As we said - we can judge those attributes only by the information you provide us - which makes it difficult to find an equal distribution. Thus we look at those criteria in terms of: Is the project based on a solid technical standard?

Impact

We want to award the IMPACT the submitted project has for Neos, the Community or its Ecosystem. This can be a well-known brand that makes Neos well-known, but also a helpful tool that everyone uses and that assists Neos spreading the word (remember Flownative's Beach that had won the Gold Award in 2019?). Impact means, the project brought or can bring visibility for Neos to people who did not see it before, so for example editors, end-users or developers. The project can be seen as a role model for other projects in the community.

Innovation

We also want to award INNOVATION. We are looking for projects which push the boundaries of what is possible, which enable things in neos everyone thought were impossible, which might question the status quo and use the strenghts of Neos or Flow or combine their building blocks in new, creative ways. 
Whether you have introduced new features or new concepts that can lead to a new way the system can be used or are very innovative in terms of tech stack, user interface, design or usage. Neos has always been a modern, innovative system because of a modern, innovative community. This is why we especially want to honor innovation.

Contribution

Last but not least we want to award CONTRIBUTION. Since Neos is an open source software and can only survive because people and companies have advantages in using free and open software - we especially honor those who give back. This can be voluntary hours that went back into the Neos Community, into the development of packages or in other Open Source Projects - but clearly related with the submitted project (i.e. the project funded a certain amount of hours, a certain package or the project facilitated a certain development). 

The Neos Dedication Award has been a success in itself. For several years we have been awarding projects that might not exaclty fit into certain categories, but would not have been possible without DEDICATION. Dedication stands for our very valuable contributors within the community and for those who push Neos CMS forward inside and outside our community.

It is an honor to be nominated for a Dedication Award, because you cannot submit your project for "Dedication only" - it is up to the jury to nominate your project.

Criteria for the Dedication Award will only be specified by the jury after the submission phase. Since the submitted projects are diverse in nature, we cannot tell aforehand what exactly can be judged at all. Judgment will be based on terms like sustainability, innovation, society/community impact or spirit. Those terms apply to the project or the company or agency submitting. Dedication is related to the greater good for all of us. It’s about environmental, social or technical impact within our society, not only within the Neos Eco System.

Look at the "Previous Award Winners" section to get an impression what we mean with "Dedication".