One of the highlights of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) is finding out who won bragging rights in the annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards. More than 47,000 open source projects were nominated for slots in one of 12 categories, but only 85 were chosen as finalists.

The awards party was held last night at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA. where guests gathered to listen to music, snag swag from ThinkGeek, play retro games, and even line up for free tattoos. While past SourceForge parties were recorded with a handheld camera and later uploaded to an online video hosting service, this year the audio/visual setup had a distinctly professional quality. The entire event was shown live on a dedicated Web site for real-time viewing.

SourceForge combed through more than 47,000 nominations to announce which of the open source projects it hosts are finalists in the Fourth Annual Community Choice Awards. Eighty-five projects in 12 categories are in the running and the winners will be announced on July 23, 2009 at OSCON.

Categories run the gamut from technical (Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins) and entertaining (Best Project for Gamers) to "life-changing" (Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything). Nominated projects are equally wide-ranging and, while there are a number of familiar names like KeePass Password Safe and Audacity, quite a few lesser known projects are being given the opportunity to shine. Avogadro, a cross platform, 3-dimensional molecular editor, is up for Best Project for Academia and microblogging client Choqok has been nominated for Best New Project.