Product Team Announcements: Oliver, Dan, and Nick - Wikitech-l

24 Sep 2013

Everyone,

I have a few announcements (apologies for the delay as this was posted to
an internal WMF staff mailing list a few weeks ago).

First, I'd like to announce Oliver's transition to Product Analyst
(contractor, full time).  As many of you know, Oliver has been working with
us for the past ~2 years as a Community Liaison.  As Community Liaison, he
has helped provide the critical link between the English Wikipedia editing
community and WMF product teams on Page Curation, Echo, AFT, and
VisualEditor.  Effective immediately, Oliver will be transitioning to the
newly created role of Product Analyst.  In this role, Oliver will support
the Flow team in mapping out the myriad of complex workflows, templates,
bots, and other craziness that happens on talk pages, and also providing
analytical support to help the Flow team prioritize features. [*]

We are also welcoming Dan Garry (User: Deskana) as Associate Product
Manager (contractor, full time), working with Rob Lanphier's Platform team.
 Dan has been an editor of the English Wikipedia since 2005, a sysop since
2006, bureaucrat since 2007, CheckUser since 2007. . .you get the picture.
 He will be working with members of the Platform team on a variety of
projects, which could include Admin tools, OAuth/OpenID, community code
repository.  He has a BS in Computer Science and is awaiting his thesis
approval for an MS in Integrative Systems Biology.

Both Oliver and Dan are planning on relocating to SF.

Also, please welcome Nick Wilson (User: Quiddity) as Community Liaison
(contractor, part time).  Nick has been an editor on the English Wikipedia
since 2005 (over 37k edits) and has participated in community-lead
redesigns of hubs on the English Wikipedia, including the Main Page,
Community Portal, Help: Contents, and Portal: Contents.  He will be working
as the CL for the Flow team, helping to ensure open lines of communication
between our editing community and the Flow team, and surfacing issues that
are important to our editors.  Nick will be working remotely from Victoria,
BC, Canada.

Please join me in congratulating Oliver on his new role, and in welcoming
Dan and Nick!

Howie

[*] The Product Analyst role is new, and it may be a while before we have
it nailed down.  To complicate things further, Oliver has been doing
Product Analyst-type activities (e.g. template inventory for Page Curation)
even as a CL :)