RAV: Aine MacDermot & Mykola Bilokonsky

The Newsvine Team is proud to announce that Aine MacDermot and Mykola Bilokonsky have been selected to receive Newsvine's highest honor, the Random Act of Vineness Award - for contributions to this community that go far beyond the call of duty.

Aine MacDermot - for her continuing dedication to helping others around the Vine, and for creating and fostering the Newsvine Help Group.

Newsvine Help isn't the first instance of Aine's many good deeds, it is but the latest incarnation of it. Aine has offered a helping hand to Newsviners from all walks of life ever since her first keystroke here. She has been patient and has gone out of her way to make others feel at home. Her unending dedication to increasing the site's usefulness to others has earned her the highest distinction we're able to offer a Newsvine user. Her motivation for having fielded countless questions and concerns across the site has been the satisfaction that others are able to find their way in what has become a very useful, but sometimes complex array of features we've built over the past year. Aine seldom contacts us directly with questions, yet she figures things out quickly and helps others to understand what comes easily to her. As the recipient of the most votes of All-Time on Newsvine (27,695 and counting), Aine is perhaps our best example of a Newsvine user. She is courteous, helpful and extremely productive - having seeded 2,781 links and written 25 articles in less than a year. Bottom line: Aine = Newsvine Ambassador

Mykola Bilokonsky - for his inspiring idea to create Newsvine Groups, and for his hard work in founding and cultivating our healthiest example of this feature.

Some people make offhand feature requests in comment threads. Others take it a step further and send us a site suggestion via email. Mykola takes all of this to the highest possible level and creates entire movements around his ideas. One of his ideas is now an integral part of our culture here at Newsvine. Furthermore, developing Newsvine Groups has been the largest project we have worked on to date - and we're extremely proud to say that it began as a request from a user. We're sure that Myk would've preferred it if we'd stuck with his original name, Guilds, but we're confident that he's still very happy to see them implemented after the long wait. Even at times when it seemed that everyone else had lost interest in his pet project, Mykola stuck to his vision and continued a conversation with us about the development of Groups. Since launch, Groups have proved to be a powerful element to further Newsvine's mission of connecting people to each other for the purpose of mutual edification and enjoyment. We find it very fitting, as a result, that the healthiest group on the Vine is also a creation of Mykola's - Newsvine Community. With 235 members, this group is an ever-bubbling reflection of Mykola's insatiable appetite for study and improvement of Newsvine's greatest asset - it's users. We'd like to thank Mykola for his unending enthusiasm, his lasting commitment and his unparalleled creativity toward the Newsvine community, by awarding him the Random Act of Vineness.

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