PSSI announced the first ever annual Kenneth Gonsalves Award recipient yesterday, the opening day of PyCon India 2013.

Baiju Muthukadan, popularly known in FOSS circles as "Baiju" was chosen for the award after a selection process where nominations where invited from the community.

Baiju has been a long time Free Software advocate and leader in the Indian FOSS community. He was one of the founders of the Swathanthra Malayalam Comptuting collective, a project which was founded in 2002 to standardize, localize and promote various FOSS applications in the Malayalam language.

He is also a core contributor to Zope and has written books on Zope3 and the Zope Component Architecture (ZCA). Baiju has also contributed to the Koha  project, a popular open source Integrated Library Management framework.

Baiju was one of the earliest members of BangPypers and has been one of the most active and helpful members of the Python community in India.

Baiju works for ZeOmega as Architect, R&D.

He blogs at http://baijum.blogspot.in/ .

All the best to Baiju for his current and future endeavours !

Anand B Pillai