Congratulations to the Outstanding Contribution Award Winners for The Open Group OSDU® Forum, Edinburgh, April 2024

By Ash Patel – CDMP, Marketing Specialist, The Open Group

During The Open Group Edinburgh Summit in April 2024, Patrick Kelly, Product Line Manager Subsurface Data & Insights, Chevron, and Jane McConnell, Spinning Yarns, The Open Group OSDU® Forum Vice Chair, along with Dennis Stevens, OSDU Forum Program Director, The Open Group, proudly announced the winners of The Open Group OSDU Forum Awards. The awards were hosted by Daniel Bachmann, ExxonMobil.

We are proud to announce the winners of the Spring 2024 OSDU Forum Outstanding Contribution Awards!

The full list of awards and winners can be found below:

• Technical Achievement: Received by Laurent Deny [AspenTech] and Neelesh Thakur [SLB]
• OSDU Advancement: Received by Raghd Gadrbouh [CGG] and Rustam Lotsmanenko [EPAM]
• Team Leadership: Received by Jenni LaRue [Chevron] and Pierrick Gaudin [TotalEnergies]
• Special Award: Received by Thomas Gehrmann [Invited Expert]

I caught up with some of the Award winners ( Laurent Deny, A spenTech , Jenni LaRue, Chevron , and Pierrick Gaudin, TotalEnergies ), after the ceremony, where they spoke about how they felt winning their respective awards.

Laurent Deny , the winner of the Technical Achievement award:

“I am deeply grateful to my peers for recognizing my technical contributions to the platform with this award. I am also very grateful to the AspenTech team and the Energistics ® Consortium RESQML community for their support and collaboration. I hope it will encourage other engineers and domain developers to participate more in standardization and interoperability activities.”

Jenni LaRue and Pierrick Gaudin , the two winners of the Team Leadership award:

“Our community is full of talented, smart, hardworking people. Being recognized for team leadership means more to me than I can put into words. I’m incredibly thankful to those who nominated me.”

Pierrick Gaudin : “I joined the OSDU Forum since it’s ‘official’ kick-off in October 2018 – when we were about 30 or 40 peoples only. With a few members from different operators, we created process and principles to set what was ‘Data Definition Sub-Committee’ (know Data Concepts) – and we always managed to create a maintain a strong community mindset where ‘trust’ is probably our key value. After James Pipe (The real father of DDSC) slowed down in his commitments, I stepped in to maintain and increase this community and this mindset. This is, obviously, an honor to be recognized with this award – but I really think this is more a recognition for the whole team efforts than for my personal contribution. And as such, I’m really proud to see that 4 over 8 awards were presented to Data Definition Key Contributors. Trust, Respect, Focus & Community remain our key values more than ever”.

Finally, congratulations to all those who were nominated and to the winners of the OSDU Forum Outstanding Contributor Awards. Thank you also to the nominators, as the success of the OSDU Forum is built upon the efforts and contributions from everyone.

Ash Patel – CDMP, Marketing Specialist, joined The Open Group in 2020, initially working in the Certification Team as a Certification Services Agent, before moving into the Marketing Team where he now works on marketing collateral, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and co-hosting The Open Group, Open Comments Podcast . Ash holds a First-Class Bachelor’s Degree in Media Production (BA Hons) from Coventry University and has a background in content writing, copy writing, script writing, photo editing, and video editing. He is based in the UK.