There were more than 3,000 submissions to this year’s Bobs awards. Our jury is currently selecting this year’s finalists and users will be able to scroll through 14 language’s worth of interesting and inspiring people’s work starting April 2. The Bobs’ jury members will get together for two days of discussions starting on May 4 to decide on the winners of the 2014 Jury Awards. They’ll dig into the details of each of the nominees before reaching their verdict in the six multilingual categories.

On April 2, we’ll also start the online voting phase at www.thebobs.com for the People’s Choice Awards in all the contest’s categories.

The Bobs awards honor websites and projects  in 14 languages that champion the open exchange of ideas and freedom of expression. When the annual awards launched in 2004, blogs were just beginning to establish themselves as a new type of media and The Bobs aimed to show that this new form of communication was worthy of being taken seriously and to point to the excellent example of work being done online to foster dialogue across language barriers.  The Bobs represent one of Deutsche Welle’s ongoing efforts to contribute to promoting freedom of expression and the upholding of human rights on the Internet and around the world.