San Francisco, CA, September 25, 2006 —Tides Foundation today announced that the inaugural $10,000 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest will go to George Hotelling for his development work on CitizenSpeak – a free email advocacy service for grassroots organizations and an open source module on the Drupal content management system.

The new Pizzigati Prize — a project launched by Tides Foundation’s Florence and Frances Family Fund — aims to honor individuals who, in the spirit of open source computing, fashion outstanding applications that help nonprofits become more effective in their ongoing efforts for social change.

“Our judges faced a difficult choice,” notes Jason Sanders, the Tides Foundation philanthropic advisor who coordinates the Pizzigati Prize. “Each of the six finalists for our first prize has made a valuable contribution to public interest computing.”

Hotelling’s work on the CitizenSpeak project began when he realized that local groups needed a tool that could help them impact local decisions and decision-makers. He soon discovered that CitizenSpeak.org, a free online service founded in 2002 by Jo Lee and Pablo Calamera, shared the same vision. Hotelling, with over a decade of experience working with open source tools rebuilt CitizenSpeak and made the code available as an open source software.

Community groups have been putting the revamped CitizenSpeak to work in a wide range of campaigns, everything from a Rhode Island effort to stop the siting of new schools on contaminated land to a multi-denominational offensive against religious intolerance in the Delaware town of Indian River.