Two Rounds of Selection
The competition was held in two stages. First, a people's jury of fifteen selected the nominees, and then an expert jury named the winners. Sun Awards 2001 was a general competition with fifteen nominations, and Public Life and Politics was just one of them. There was no separate award for political sites, so winning in this category meant the best result among resources of public resonance, not among all web projects in the country.
The expert jury included Oleh Horbachov from Kompanion, Serhiy Rachynsky from InternetUA, Alexey Goncharov from Topping, Alexey Tanchik from BIGMIR)NET, Anna Abazopulo from Avanport, and the director of Ukrainsky Portal, Alexey Mas. The judges evaluated the resources that had passed the public selection and chose the best in each nomination.
The competition was indicative of the Ukrainian Internet in 2001. It brought together commercial stores, news sites, corporate resources, educational projects, and financial services under one roof. For a country where most projects were created by small teams and with personal funds, such a general award provided a rare opportunity to see the market as a whole.
Winners and the Audience Award
The business idea of the year was recognized as turbaza. The commercial resource was the bookstore bookshop, which at the time of the award had 3,468 books in its assortment. In the News category, Korrespondent won; among corporate sites, Golden Telecom took first place; the financial resource was the Ukrainian Financial Server; and the jury named the atlasua catalog as the best set of services. In the Science and Education category, the school site shkola2 won.
A separate audience choice award went to the Klitschko brothers' site. This award differed from the expert decisions because it was chosen not by a professional jury but by a vote of the audience.
Ukrainska Pravda itself, in its note about its own victory, did not hide its satisfaction. The editorial staff wrote about the site as follows:
“became the best political web resource in the Ukrainian Internet space”
This wording referred to the experts' assessment in a specific nomination and was not an overall ranking of all resources in the country.
Survey on Influence in the Ukrainian Internet
In a postscript to the note, UP cited the results of a survey by the Institute of the Information Society on the most influential person in the Ukrainian Internet. First place went to Kuchma, then president of Ukraine. Heorhiy Gongadze, the journalist whose case had by then become one of the country's main political scandals, came fourth.
To understand the environment in which this award took place, it is useful to know how the biography of one of the jury members unfolded. Alexey Mas was born in 1974 and entered the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University without exams, on the basis of physics olympiads. From 1993 to 1995, he worked at NIIASS, then at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he served at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa processing on HP-UX.
In January 1999, Mas, together with Ruslan Dmytrakovych, launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. The project was written in Perl, the work took three weeks, and expenses amounted to about $100. Already on March 7, 2000, Mas became director of Ukrainsky Portal (UAPortal), which in November 2001 was among the well-known Ukrainian Internet resources and participated in evaluating competitors.
Mas's fate was tragic: on October 6, 2021, Alexey Mas died in Kyiv at the age of 47 after an illness. His death was reported on October 8 by his brother Viktor Mas.
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