Each year at the Agile200X Conference, the Agile Alliance presents theGordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice. Here's itsdescription:

The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice demonstrate, in the opinion of the Award Committee, their potential to become leaders of the field. The award comes with a check for US$5000.

Last year's recipients were J. B. Rainsberger and Jim Shore. This year's are:

Laurent Bossavit, for translating Extreme Programming Explained into French, for early and helpful activity on the English-language XP mailing list, for organizing a French-language site, mailing list, and wiki, for XP Day France, for the (incipient) thoughts on his blog, and for his championing of code dojos.

The collaborators Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce forhelping found XP Day, for theirlong-time involvement inthe ExtremeTuesday Club, for their joint role in the development,evolution, and popularization of the idea of mock objects and itsrealization in jMock, and for thenetworks of collaborations they're involvedin (storytellingin Fitand scrapheapprogramming, for example).

(That "network of collaboration" thing presents a problem. Steve and Nat are extreme examples of a problem the Pask award faces: given the collaborative nature of Agile, any boundary you draw that says "this idea, here, is due to that set of people, there" is bound to leave out contributors. Steve and Nat are far from the only people who've worked on mock objects, and they've both collaborated with other people on other things. Where do you draw the award's line? There'd be some justification for giving it to the whole of London, or at least to the whole Extreme Tuesday Club.

(The committee—Rachel Davies, J.B. Rainsberger, Jim Shore, and me—discussed such matters for two and a half hours, maybe more, one night [causing me to rudely skip dinner with Laurent, for what I hope he now thinks is a good reason]. At times, I found myself thinking that maybe the whole idea was too much trouble. Where I ended up is that we should not avoid doing greater good because we cannot distribute all the credit that's deserved. I hope no one gets upset. Believe me, trying to pick two awards from many possibilities is just no fun at all.)

Our criteria are evolving (and, starting with this second year,they're mainly in the hands of the past recipients). We are lookingfor people who provide both ideas and actions. We want people who areadvancing the state of the practice. But we also want people who arespreading knowledge of the existing state of the practice, so thatAgile teams know what more there is to learn. And we also want peoplewho are helping people on a personal level, not just at the abstractlevel of ideas.