The newsletter is also available on-wiki here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-12-02
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We are very happy to welcome Genoveva Galarza Heredero who is joining the
Abstract Wikipedia team as a software engineer.
Genoveva finished her Software Engineering degree in Madrid in 2009, and
since then has worked in various places. She worked for some time in
Argentina and then moved to India, where she stayed for five years, first
working on the architecture of expert systems that leveraged NLP and Linked
Open Data. Then she started her own social venture, an effort to move
Indian IT hubs to more eco-friendly ways of commuting. She now lives in
Madrid again, and after working for some years as a full-stack developer in
projects on agriculture, green energy, and data privacy, has joined the
Wikimedia Foundation.
She is passionate about art and free culture online, and has used her hobby
as a comic artist to work along the Spanish and Latin American webcomic
community to create faneo.es, a non-profit project led by its members that
attempts to provide an open and free space to publish, read, and even
create comics collaboratively.
Let’s share a few of her words:
“I got into IRC and Usenet when I was a kid: I discovered communities,
became part of them and ultimately learned how to code with the help of
others who shared their knowledge online. I can honestly say that
everything that I am today - a programmer, a comic creator, even a nature
lover or a linguistics geek - I owe it to the availability of free and open
knowledge and culture online. I have seen in my own flesh how incredibly
self-defining it is to have access to local and global knowledge, so I am
really excited to join the Wikimedia movement and, as we say in Spanish,
put my little grain of sand to make this possible for others. Hopefully
I’ll be learning a lot more about how language works, about bigger
communities, and about defying the for-profit approach to progress and
succeeding! I now have a lot of catching up to do, but I’m looking forward
to working with all of you and hopefully making meaningful contributions
soon.”
Genoveva will also expand the project’s timezones, so we can have
discussions with volunteers from more global regions in real-time. Given
that she is joining James Forrester as the second software engineer on the
team, she will be working on all the parts of the system for now: storage,
display, and editing on the wiki, the back-end evaluation engine service
and related APIs, the general UX, etc.
As the team grows, we will also start to implement more structure and
process in the development. We set up a new IRC channel at
#wikipedia-abstract-techconnect
<https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikipedia-abstract-tech> that will
(but does not yet) track changes to the source code and to the task boards.
Other technical streams will also be reflected on that. You are all welcome
to join this new IRC channel.
Please join me in welcoming Geno to the team as we are continuing our work
on the new Wikimedia project.