Hi folks,
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.
As you know, we've been searching for a CTO since last fall, when Brion announced his decision to leave Wikimedia for StatusNet. We were looking for someone with plenty of leadership experience and a deep understanding of open source technology, who could lead our technical staff, evangelize on behalf of Mediawiki, and set up systems and processes to help our staff and Wikimedia technology volunteers work successfully together. Danese fits the bill on all counts: I'm very happy she'll be joining us.
Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun's OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel's Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years.
Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla. Danese has lived and traveled internationally, particularly in developing countries, and speaks several languages, including French and Moroccan Arabic.
As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages.
All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially, Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring, APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her.
Danese will begin her work February 3. Until June 30, Danese has a standing one day/week commitment to support the code review process of the SETI Institute.
Finally, I want to thank the Walker Talent Group (www.walkertalentgroup.com) for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated.
Sue Gardner Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Crossposting to wikitech. Welcome Danese!
Sue Gardner wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.
As you know, we've been searching for a CTO since last fall, when Brion announced his decision to leave Wikimedia for StatusNet. We were looking for someone with plenty of leadership experience and a deep understanding of open source technology, who could lead our technical staff, evangelize on behalf of Mediawiki, and set up systems and processes to help our staff and Wikimedia technology volunteers work successfully together. Danese fits the bill on all counts: I'm very happy she'll be joining us.
Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun's OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel's Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years.
Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla. Danese has lived and traveled internationally, particularly in developing countries, and speaks several languages, including French and Moroccan Arabic.
As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages.
All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially, Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring, APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her.
Danese will begin her work February 3. Until June 30, Danese has a standing one day/week commitment to support the code review process of the SETI Institute.
Finally, I want to thank the Walker Talent Group (www.walkertalentgroup.com) for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated.
Sue Gardner Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
On Thursday 28 Jan 2010 23:02:46 Bod Notbod wrote:
She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her.
Welcome Danese. Impressive CV!
I second that - I wish Danese good luck in her new role.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
On 28 January 2010 20:16, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.
Holy crap. Win!
Mike Godwin, Danese Cooper ... who next? I hear Jonathan Schwartz is looking for a job ...
- d.
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.
That means she hasn't looked at the parser code yet! :-)
Welcome, Danese!
Magnus
Marhaban lik 3and Wikimédia Danese ! Welcome to Wikimedia Danese!
2010/1/29 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.
That means she hasn't looked at the parser code yet! :-)
Welcome, Danese!
Magnus
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Sue Gardner wrote:
As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages.
All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially, Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring, APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her.
This is such great news! Congratulations to everyone: The hiring team for finding such a great person to join the Foundation staff in such a critical role, Danese for finding a great place to work, and all the helpers in between that made the process successful.
I'm thrilled to hear that Danese will be starting work so soon, and that "filling some key staffing gaps" will be at the top of the agenda. The tech priorities we have currently show, I think, that the Foundation is truly matured. Instead of dealing with short-term emergencies, now we're looking forward to long-needed backup capabilities, and growing a second datacentre. Instead of new toy software features, we're concentrating on a strong code review and quality assurance process, and major enhancements targeted to meet wider strategic goals. As frustrating as the upcoming tasks are (and they have been thorns in someone's side since Wikipedia was founded, in some cases) it should be an enormous source of pride that those are what's being tackled.
Welcome, Danese! Hold on your hat :D
- -Mike
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org