The LDraw.org Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the 2017 James Jessiman Memorial Award (JJMA) recipient is LDraw Parts Library Administrator Chris Dee.
There was no discussion over the recipient for the this year's James Jessiman Memorial Award and the SteerCo reached consensus immediately.
Chris discovered LDraw in 1997 or 1998 after abandoning a similar project to build a LEGO parts library in PostScript. The initial motivation was to create replacement instructions for second-hand sets he had acquired, and to produce instructions for the alternative models - this was in the days before the existence of internet resources like PICSL and its predecessors. Frustrated at the very first hurdle by the omission of part 4080 (Tipper Bucket 4 x 6) he set about authoring it and was amazed to see it released in the 1998-03 update. More parts followed, and circumstances found Chris concentrating on the patterned minifig torsos, which had largely been overlooked at that time. The intellectual challenge of part authoring and the then lack of functionally rich model creation tools (like MLCad) overtook the instruction creation idea. He soon installed Steve Bliss' LDraw Add-On program (LDAO) and with L3Lab as a renderer found an efficient toolset for part authoring - a combination he still favours today. Appointment as the a second LDraw Library Admin followed in 2003.
Beside the regular library updates Chris had the enormous task to standardises the headers of more than 3300 files with the primary purpose of aligning the library with the Contributor Agreement back in 2008.
More information on the JJMA can be found at: http://www.ldraw.org/article/222.html
Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw.org Steering Committee
There was no discussion over the recipient for the this year's James Jessiman Memorial Award and the SteerCo reached consensus immediately.
Chris discovered LDraw in 1997 or 1998 after abandoning a similar project to build a LEGO parts library in PostScript. The initial motivation was to create replacement instructions for second-hand sets he had acquired, and to produce instructions for the alternative models - this was in the days before the existence of internet resources like PICSL and its predecessors. Frustrated at the very first hurdle by the omission of part 4080 (Tipper Bucket 4 x 6) he set about authoring it and was amazed to see it released in the 1998-03 update. More parts followed, and circumstances found Chris concentrating on the patterned minifig torsos, which had largely been overlooked at that time. The intellectual challenge of part authoring and the then lack of functionally rich model creation tools (like MLCad) overtook the instruction creation idea. He soon installed Steve Bliss' LDraw Add-On program (LDAO) and with L3Lab as a renderer found an efficient toolset for part authoring - a combination he still favours today. Appointment as the a second LDraw Library Admin followed in 2003.
Beside the regular library updates Chris had the enormous task to standardises the headers of more than 3300 files with the primary purpose of aligning the library with the Contributor Agreement back in 2008.
More information on the JJMA can be found at: http://www.ldraw.org/article/222.html
Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw.org Steering Committee