New subject: Rachel Farrand joins the Engineering Community Team as Events Coordinator

2 Sep 2014

For almost three years, Rachel Farrand has been a regular contributor in
the organization of public and internal Wikimedia events since she joined
the Wikimedia Foundation as an Admin Assistant and then Project Coordinator
with the Engineering department. This past year, Rachel has been the lead
coordinator at the WMF for the Architecture Summit in San Francisco, the
Wikimedia Hackathon in Zürich, the Wikimania Hackathon in London, most of
the Tech Talks scheduled, and many on-site and off-site meetings. Those of
us lucky to work with Rachel know that she is a reliable and patient team
worker who excels at organizing activities for others to enjoy.

For all these reasons and more, we have decided to evolve Rachel's role as
Events Coordinator at the Engineering Community team. With this change,
Rachel will be able to dedicate more time and attention to this area, where
we are already playing good tactics but we need a more consistent strategy
movement-wide. Rachel's current goals include merging our Architecture
Summit, WMF Tech Days, and SF Hackathon into a single event this Winter;
document a HowTo for hackathon organizers compiling our many lessons
learned; and keeping a regular stream of online Tech Talks and on-site
Wikimedia Tech meetups in San Francisco.

She will also assist in the organization of our outreach programs (Google
Summer of Code, FOSS Outreach Program for Women, Google Code-in):
time-based activities that share many aspects with our technical events.

It’s been a great process to work with Lynette on Rachel’s transition into
the ECT team, and we are delighted Engineering Community events will have
the dedication and focus Rachel brings to the work!.

Congrats and "Welcome" Rachel!

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil