He holds a bachelor's degree in Information Systems degree in UNIRIO (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro) and is a Masters's student in Computing and Society in the Computing and Systems Engineering Program, COPPE/UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He has also taken undergratuate course in Business at UFRRJ (Federal University of the Countryside of Rio de Janeiro).
Henrique has been the DBA (DataBase Administrator) at UNIRIO and the Lead Developer of e-UNI (eletronic UNIversity), a Learning Management System customized for universities developed over the free software Moodle platform. He is a registered user of Wikipedia since 2009, and is familiar with wikis since 2003, using TWiki in nationwide projects.
Henrique has also a lot of experience in public speaking, and has spoken in many major Brazilian IT conferences, such as FISL, LATINOWARE, CONSEGI, ENTI and CSBC. He is been part of Brazillians free software communities, such as PSL-Brasil and SLRJ and was a member of the Free Software Implementation Technical Committee of the Brazilian Federal Government.
Since life is not only made of working hours, Henrique also likes to brew his own beer (and drink it, I guess!) and plays basketball at the Campo Grande Athletic Club amatour team (we're not going into details on physical profile here, but I can assure that thanks to him we considerably increased the average height of the Brazilian team).
I wish Henrique very good luck on his job. Let's welcome him and I hope we can all work together on the challenges we'll face to improve our data analyses capacities. He went through a long hiring process and I warmly welcome him and wish him a great time with us and a lot of collaboration across teams.
About his name pronnounciation (as many asked us): "Enricke" - stress on "i" and you don't need to pronounce the "h", just ignore it.
Please find below more about the job position and the background behind it.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Our commitment: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 482 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, January 2012). Available in 282 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 21 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects. It currently employs 150 staff members. Wikimedia works with local chapter organizations in 39 countries or regions to advance the mission of the Wikimedia movement.
How can we experiment, test and track solutions and best practices among the editing community about the social norms, policies, and initiatives that will create renewed openness and promote general community health? How can we better fulfill the mission statement of the Foundation and attract more editors, especially from under-represented demographics? What type of initiative better fits improvements to be made and how can we make sure they are reaching our expected goals? What are and how to develop new tools for the community to make their editing experience better?
The need for this position emerged from a debate with the Brazilian community regarding WMF activities in Brazil. While we had previously planned to have a community organizer, to catalyse processes which had been stagnant in the Portuguese Wikimedia projects, the community demanded as a priority position to provide support in collecting data and allowing data driven decisions to be taken.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has been seen significant decrease of active editors in the last 2 years – While the average of active editors was of 1678 per month in 2010, in 2011 this average was of 1588 – a decrease of 5,4%. The Brazil Catalyst Project was created to contribute enabling a better environment so recovering losses and even growing becomes possible.
The Brazil Catalyst Program contractors, together with the community, have worked throughout a planning of activities that would help improvements on the Portuguese Wikipedia regarding collaboration, attracting new editors, retaining new editors as well as improving quality of content. However, the Brazil team has very much little data to 1) measure the impact of the its projects and work; 2) identify pros and cons on experiments and changes on the Portuguese Wikpedia; 3) lead rational and data driven discussions on the impact of projects and policies.
For this reason, we agreed on hiring a data and experiment analyst, in order to provide us with qualified information and data to develop projects and address changes.
We expect Henrique to support the community and the Brazil Catalyst Program contractors in tracking results of our actions, projects and experiments, so we can better analyse and learn from them. Sometimes we develop activities with little efforts to measure their impact and results in the short and middle term, and we also struggle with data that may contribute to long term results analyses.
The purpose of his job is therefore to work closely with the community, the WMF staff and the Brazil Catalyst Program contractors in creating ways of measuring the impact or our work and experiments, as well as identifying trends within the community and editor engagement. He is meant to do that by turning ideas from the community into some kind of reasonable experimental design and by replacing anecdotes on the impact of feature or policy changes with basic empirical evidence. We also expect he'll engage with the community (and with volunteers already engaged in data analyses) in order to build a plan for the next years and deploy it in a collaborative way.