Hi Wikidata and Commons Communities,
I’m excited to let you all know that Amanda Bittaker (cc'ed) has joined the Audiences (formerly Product) team at the Wikimedia Foundation as the Program Manager for the Structured Data on Commons program. She will be working closely with teams from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland, and the communities to complete the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant [1], expanding the capabilities of Commons to make it easier for people and institutions to find, share, and reuse Commons content.
Many people may have met Amanda already. She joined the Foundation in November 2014, working with the Learning & Evaluation team to help wiki program organizers’ design, manage, and evaluate their programs. During that time, she also partnered with engineers to build program tools such as the Program and Events Dashboard[2] and the Global Metrics Magic Button [3].
Before joining the Foundation, Amanda worked in the international development industry for five years, doing finance, program design, monitoring, and evaluation. She spent two years in South America. Once upon a time she also ran and oversaw programs at a nonprofit bicycle education space that operated entirely by general consensus, which taught her a lot about collaborative and transparent program management.
She is eager to work on Structured Data on Commons, helping our communities make Commons as useful as possible, and helping to make transitions in processes and workflows as smooth as possible. Amanda is based in San Francisco in the US. You can find her on the wikis or at Wikimania or the Wikimania hackathon in Montreal. She can converse pretty well in English and Spanish, and would like to practice her French more, but it is still very basic.
Cheers, Alex
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Sloan_Grant [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs_%26_Events_Dashboard [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Learning_patterns/How_to_use_the_global_metr...