The short version

• Voting is free and always will be.
• You need a GitHub account to nominate or vote.
• One vote per GitHub account per category; you can change it until voting closes.
• Votes cannot be bought, sold, traded, or transferred — by anyone, including us.

Eligibility

A project is eligible for a category if it has a published archive entry in that edition and meets the category’s stated criteria. Criteria are evaluated from the project’s own recorded archive data — the same evidence shown publicly on its page. We never manufacture or adjust data to make something eligible. Where a criterion cannot be determined objectively, the category relies on nomination and review instead.

Nominations

Nomination windows are per category. Some categories accept community nominations from any signed-in GitHub account; others accept nominations from verified maintainers only (shown on the category page). One nomination per person per project per category. Commit Archive administrators select finalists from nominated, eligible projects; selection is recorded in an audit trail.

Voting

Voting opens after finalists are announced and closes at the published time. Only finalists can receive votes. Your vote is recorded against your GitHub numeric account id, so one account means one vote per category — changing your mind updates that vote rather than adding another. Live vote counts are not published during voting.

Fair play and anti-fraud

Encouraging people who genuinely use your project to vote is welcome. The following are not:

• creating accounts (or using others’ accounts) to cast additional votes;
• paying for, incentivizing, or trading votes;
• automated or scripted voting.

We review suspicious patterns — such as clusters of newly created accounts voting together, or unusual voting velocity — before results are published. Flagged votes are examined by a human; we do not disqualify votes based on shared network addresses alone, because offices, universities, and mobile networks legitimately share them. Where manipulation is established, we may discount the affected votes or disqualify an entry, and we will say that a category was affected when we publish it.

Results

Winners and finalists are published on the category page, marked on the project’s archive page, and reflected in its README badge. Results become part of the frozen edition and are not revised afterwards except to correct a demonstrable error, which is recorded in our audit trail.

Removal and privacy

Award recognition never overrides removal or opt-out rights: if an entry is removed, or a contributor opts out, those rules apply to award pages and cards too (see the Removal & Opt-Out Policy). Maintainers who prefer not to participate can ask us to withdraw a project from the awards via the report form.

Changes

We may adjust these rules between editions; material changes during an open program will be noted on the awards pages with a date.