In particular, I wanted to share more about the plans for the Community Tech team. The creation of this team is a direct response to community requests for more technical support. Their mission is to understand and support the technical needs of core contributors, including improved support for expert-focused curation and moderation tools, bots, and other features. Their mandate is to work closely with you, and the Community Engagement department, to define their roadmap and deliverables. We are hiring for a leader for this team, as well as additional engineers. We will be looking within our communities to help. Until then, it will be incubated under Toby Negrin, with support from Community Engagement.
I look forward to seeing how this works out. I sometimes worry that it seems like over the years that developers have become more and more separate from the "community". Our community is our heart; It is why we are all here. Having teams dedicated to working closely with our communities sounds like an excellent idea.
-- bawolff