Today Common Voice — our crowdsourcing-initiative for an open and publicly available voice dataset that anyone can use to train speech-enabled applications — was honored as a Finalist in the Experimental category in Fast Company’s 2018 Innovation by Design Awards.

Fast Company states that Innovation by Design is the only competition to honor creative work at the intersection of design, business, and innovation. The awards, which can be found in the October 2018 issue of Fast Company, on stands September 18th, recognize people, teams, and companies solving problems through design. After spending a year researching and reviewing applicants Fast Company is honoring an influential and diverse group of 398 leaders in fashion, architecture, graphic design and data visualization, social good, user experience, and more. To see the complete list go to: https://www.fastcompany.com/innovation-by-design/2018

“The future of design is about more than coddling users,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “It’s about giving them power over their technology.” We as Mozilla couldn’t agree more. And not only to the extent of how they use technology but also how and for whom it is being developed. The recognised Common Voice experience didn’t “just happen” by chance. From the very beginning, the team around the Open Innovation project has been diligent about bringing in additional minds and perspectives from day-to-day users and experts likewise, testing and revising prototypes, all while challenging initial, strongly held assumptions. Another visible result of this is the ongoing, collaborative iteration of the project website and contribution methods with the project’s diverse communities.

For those interested in how human-centered research and design has shaped the direction of Common Voice, the Open Innovation Team has kicked-off a series of articles to share learnings about the application of Service Design to Open Source projects. These will include how communities and new experiments may benefit from, and engage with, this perspective. To read more, visit the Open Innovation Medium Blog.

The Innovation by Design Award is the second distinction for the project, after Tech publication InfoWorld, along with Open Source software developer Black Duck, named Common Voice one of the seven Open Source Rookies of the Year for 2018. Back then Common Voice made the cut from an initial list of roughly 11,000 Github/openhub projects.