Maria Ressa wins surprise award at inaugural BOLD Awards

MANILA, Philippines – Rappler CEO and executive editor Maria Ressa was given a surprise award at the inaugural BOLD Awards, held last Friday, April 5, at the H-Farm innovation platform in Venice, Italy. 

The BOLD Awards aims to shine a spotlight on bold and breakthrough projects in a number of fields, such as crowdsourcing, open innovation, and other technology-related sectors.

According to the BOLD Awards announcement, “A third special award, also for Being BOLD, was made to Maria Ressa – CEO & Executive Editor at Rappler. Rappler is a social news network that crowdsources stories to inspire investigative journalism, community engagement, and digitally fuelled actions for social change in Indonesia and the Philippines. Maria has been arrested twice, in February and March, on charges including ‘cyber libel’ after being critical of actions by the Philippines’ administration.”

Ressa was not present at the awarding ceremony. 

Ressa was arrested on February 13 on a cyber libel charge. She was only allowed to post bail for P100,000 the following day. 

In March, she was also arrested for a charge of violating the anti-dummy law. She paid bail worth P90,000 for the Anti-Dummy Law offense.(LIST: Cases vs Maria Ressa, Rappler directors, staff since 2018)

Other winners

In addition to winners in 12 categories, Ressa was one of 3 surprise awardees at the event alongside H-Farm’s Maurizio Rossi and the e-Residency Estonia platform.

The winners in 12 mainline categories were the following:

• Boldest Crowdsourced Online Platform, presented by Mathesia: Mindhive – Bruce Muirhead
• Boldest Crowdsourced Marketing & Advertising Campaign, presented by Tipalti: Rebuild Kerala – John Santhosh
• Boldest Open Innovation, presented by H-FARM: Open Cosmos – Remco Timmermans
• Boldest Space Frontier, presented by HeroX: Open Cosmos – Remco Timmermans
• Boldest AI, presented by Spark Beyond: ScienceAtHome – Janet Rafner
• Boldest Scientific Project, presented by sbv IMPROVER: ScienceAtHome – Janet Rafner
• Boldest Crowdfunding Campaign, presented by Crowdsourcing Week: Startup Italia – David Casalini
• Boldest Blockchain Platform: Medicohealth – Milan Rajlic
• Boldest ICO/Cryptocurrency: MakerDao & DAI Stablecoin – Lenka Hudakova
• Boldest Future Robot, presented by HeroX: Vostok – Roberto Polesel
• Boldest Young Achiever Under 25, presented by GoGo Places: Francesco Bellanca from Feral Horses
• Boldest Innovator, presented by Surcle: Memomi – Alexios Blanos

– Rappler.com