This year, two awards are being given out. For the first time, we have assembled an international panel of experts to judge and pick one site to win the award. The members of the panel this year were:
Roger Darlington chaired the panel. The winner this year, as chosen by the panel of experts, is the Self Employed Women's Association in India.
On behalf of the panel, Roger wrote the following:
"The Self Employed Women's Association in India impressed us as an immensely worthy organisation working in a very poor country with limited resources in support of some of the most vulnerable workers in the economy. The home page has a clean and elegant design pointing to 11 main sections and, as one passes the cursor over each link, there is a different photograph in the centre of the page design. The information on the site is very practical and useful for its intended audience and it is presented in a clean and clear manner. Photographs are essentially confined to a single 'gallery' page, reflecting the reality that most users of the site will only have a narrowband connection and will not want to wait a long time for pages to download. Therefore, although flashier and fuller sites were nominated for the award, we went for the one that in our judgement best served the real needs of its particular users."
In addition, this year we ran our usual open vote in which anyone could vote for any union website. In this year's competition, 8,343 votes were cast for 525 trade union websites around the world.