This year, New_Public and PublicSpaces present the Open Socials Awards for the very first time. With this award, we aim to stimulate the field of decentralised social media, with open social principles at its heart, celebrating the efforts of those building healthy, sustainable, and sovereign online social spaces, and showing the world that such spaces are possible.
The awards are judged by a fully independent expert jury, consisting of well-known digital pioneers Audrey Tang and Mike Masnick, alongside Laurens Hof, an active European analyst of the open protocol sector; Johannes Ernst, founder of the Fediforum; Melanie Bartos, Science Communicator at the University of Innsbruck; and Robin Berjon, Board Director of the Modal Foundation.