[1]The Canadian Internet Registration Authority [1] (CIRA) announced the winners of its first annual .CA Impact Awards [2] at the mesh conference [3] in Toronto, on the evening of May 25. Winners were chosen for using their .CA websites to make a positive cultural, technical, economic, or social impact. Four winners received $5,000 each as well as national recognition.
“At CIRA, we try to keep track of all the great .CA websites out there, but with over 1.6 million registered .CA sites it’s hard to keep up,” says Byron Holland, President and CEO of CIRA. “The .CA Impact Awards has really opened our eyes to some of the amazing work done on the web by Canadians. It’s truly inspiring.”
The awards were broken down in four broad categories, the winners for each category are:
- eLearning: ArtsAlive.CA [4], an educational performing arts website produced by the National Arts Centre, is the pre-eminent resource for performing arts education in Canada, engaging Canadians through information, multimedia and activities.
- Small Business: OpenMedia.CA [5] uses its .CA website to protect the open Internet and to promote the innovation and free speech that it enables. OpenMedia.ca is currently the home of the viral Stop the Metre campaign [6], bringing the public together to fight for a more affordable Internet.
- Non-Profit: UppercaseGallery.CA [7] is now an online artist community, featuring a blog, exhibitions, and a magazine. UppercaseGallery began as a gallery in downtown Calgary that featured the work of emerging and established graphic designers before moving online. Its .CA domain name allows Uppercase Gallery to clearly define itself as Canadian, as much of its web traffic is international.
- Web Technology and Design: NewPad.CA [8] is an online apartment-hunting portal intended to make apartment hunting easier by mapping out online apartment listings in cities across Canada.
The .CA Impact Awards are part of CIRA’s ongoing commitment to invest in Canada’s Internet community and are designed to recognize youth, educators, not-for-profit organizations, small businesses, technology developers and web designers.