Please join me in congratulating Mark Bergsma on his promotion last week to Operations EPM. Mark has been a volunteer since 2004, and a paid Network Engineer on our team since August 2006. He's been helping us with our extreme scaling issues (by debugging and tuning our Squid setup, creating our Netherlands caching center, and generally developing our network strategy) since the very beginning. For some time now Mark has been unofficially in charge of managing the entire Ops Team's deliverables including designing and implementing our new Primary Data Center in Ashburn, VA, and the other Ops activities mentioned at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects>. Mark has expressed an interest in gaining some experience with people management skills as a logical next step in his career, and to that end we will gradually add direct reports under Mark over the next year, starting with the Data Center Ops crew. He will continue to report to me until we hire a Director of Technical Operations. I know you will do all you can to support Mark in his new role. Danese Cooper CTO, Wikimedia Foundation