Governance
Rules & eligibility
The credibility document for a free, vendor-neutral awards program. If a rule is not written here, it does not exist as a gotcha later.
Why the awards exist
Production engineering runs on answers people gave away: docs, postmortems, open tools, podcasts, newsletters, talks, communities, mentors. Vendor award seasons keep score for products. Almost nobody keeps a public score for the unpaid work that actually got someone through an incident.
The LMGT Awards (“Let Me Give Thanks”) are that scoreboard — annual, free, scoped to production engineering, with published conflict rules because the producer also publishes eligible work. The sibling joke at lmgt.com asks the snarky question; this program answers it sincerely.
Two rules govern everything
Work that helps people run software in production, published somewhere anyone can reach it.
Companies are eligible for what they gave away, never for what they sell.
Personal projects by people employed at vendors remain eligible when the work itself is given away (for example a personal newsletter, an open-source tool, or a public postmortem). “Published somewhere anyone can reach” means a public URL — no login wall, no paywall — at the time of nomination.
What counts as production engineering
Year one is a single track: production engineering — DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, cloud, observability, incident response, and infrastructure security. Not “all of tech.” Not bootcamps or paid courses as a category class.
Growth later is a new track, never category inflation inside this one. The hard cap stays thirteen competitive categories per track (twelve pillar + Rising Signal).
How a cycle works
- Nominations — Anyone can nominate public work (including their own). Nominations are free. Misplaced categories are re-filed, not discarded.
- Moderation — Entries must meet the two eligibility rules and point at a real public URL. Obvious spam and product pitches are removed.
- Judging — A named external panel publishes bios before nominations open. Judges score against the category definition, then settle finalists and the Jury Award. Cycle-one judges are ineligible as nominees.
- People's Choice — Public ballot with email confirmation. One confirmed vote per person per category. Full vote counts publish with results.
- Results — Two co-equal honors per competitive category: Jury Award and People's Choice. Neither is a runner-up. Sustained Thanks is editor-selected and non-competitive.
Governance
- Two honors per category — Jury Award (external panel) and People's Choice (public double-opt-in ballot). They are co-equals.
- No fees — no paid entry, nomination, or category. Sponsors never appear on nominate, ballot, or results pages.
- Publisher conflict — Teller's Tech properties are eligible for People's Choice only, never Jury Award. Publisher-affiliated entrants carry a visible marker. Teller's Tech casts no judge vote in any category it has entered.
- Ship It Weekly enters Rising Signal only (not Podcast of the Year). Self-nomination is welcome; transparency is the point.
- Judges in cycle one are fully ineligible as nominees or finalists. Affiliations are printed on the judges page.
- Disclosure — Every page carries: produced by Teller's Tech, publisher of Ship It Weekly and On Call Brief.
What a winner receives
A Golden Answer — a permanent results page that does not move, an embeddable badge, and public thanks from practitioners. There is no cash prize and no paid “package.” The honor is the record.