Eleven Web sites -- in fields from the arts to commerce -- garnered Global Information Infrastructure Awards on Monday. The sites were recognized as "champions of cyberspace" for "best practices and new models in the use of the Internet and network technologies." The names of the winners were announced at the third annual GII Awards Ceremony, hosted at Comdex by film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
Jim Hake, who founded GII in 1994, says that the awards are "not about what's cool. The focus is on businesses and organizations who are using the Net to achieve a real outcome." The winning sites offer "a glimpse of how the Internet will transform every sector of society," he says.
Dia Center for the Arts was worthy of an award in the arts and entertainment category for commissioning and curating large-scale art projects for the new medium, Hake says.
IndyGov, selected as best government site, encourages residents of Indianapolis, Indiana, to participate in local governance online -- even allowing visitors to have input into the allocation of city budgets. IndyGov was chosen as "a model of enlightened government, which views the citizen as a valued customer of what the government has to offer," Hake explains.
Winning sites were chosen from a field of 60 finalists by a panel of judges that included Net luminaries and industry leaders Esther Dyson, Don Tapscott, Patricia Seybold, Reed Hundt, and Vint Cerf. The winners were drawn from a wide spectrum of Net applications, from a site that offers community forums and health advice for those infected with HIV, to a project where high schoolers team up to build educational Web pages, to Yahoo, which snagged this year's "netpreneur" award.
Hake believes the most important question facing the online world is how to close the gap between those who have the Net access and training to "get on the upward 21st century trajectory" and those who don't. "There's room on that trajectory for everyone. It's not a medium of scarcity."
GII is aiming to brand itself as "the Oscars of the Internet," says spokesperson Jill Mangino. Previous winners have included the Jason VII Project Underwater Net Site, the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, the DO-IT Program at the University of Washington, and HotWired.
In December of 1997, the GII program was sold to Softbank Interactive.
This year's winners were: the Dia Center for the Arts, Getting Real, Schwab, The Body, ThinkQuest, IndyGov, OncoLink, Yahoo, GUSTO, SERVEnet, and the Community Technology Centers' Network.
