In 2012, he travelled to France and bought me a beer to thank me for my work on Org-Mode, and it was great. He was enthusiastic about this worldwide half-random connections, and insisted on how great it was to be able to connect with everyone in this way... we certainly miss him and that spirit.
Hi, I'm in charge of code.gouv.fr and I initiated this BlueHats prize.
The money comes from the French government (4x10K€ for the four prizes).
We wanted to do this with NLnet to benefit from their experience and to rely on another entity to transfer the funds.
We received a lot of interesting submissions and asking public administrations who deserves the award is already a very nice exercise. We will write more about the process and the lessons learned after this first (experimental) iteration.
No, there is no official French announcement (yet).