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 -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate