Everyone,

I am pleased to announce that we have two contractors joining the Technology team. Fabrice Florin will be joining us for the next six months as Product Consultant, leading the development of the next version of the Article Feedback Tool. Oliver Keyes (User: Ironholds on enwp) will be joining us as a community liaison for the next three months. His role is to help ensure that the community input is better incorporated into WMF’s product development process.

Fabrice has extensive background in the fields of education and journalism. He is founder and executive director of NewsTrust, a nonprofit social news site devoted to good journalism -- as well as Truthsquad, a network dedicated to fact-checking the political claims made during election campaigns. His previous ventures include: Handtap, a wireless content service for mobile phones; shockwave.com, a web entertainment site at Macromedia; Apple Computer's Multimedia Lab, a new media R&D group; and a variety of other roles in media and technology. Fabrice earned four patents for his interactive TV work at Apple and was recently elected an Ashoka Fellow for his work as social entrepreneur [1]. Read more in his online bio[2].

Oliver has been an editor since 2006 and is both an administrator and an OTRS volunteer on the English Wikipedia. With strong experience in content creation as well as administrative tasks, he has a broad base of knowledge that will undoubtedly be helpful in coordinating community feedback, organizing discussions, and making sure more voices are heard as part of the product development process.

As many of you know, the Tech department continues to look for ways to gather input from our experienced editors when designing new features. Oliver’s job will be to act as a conduit between WMF’s development team and members of the community, helping editors make suggestions on feature development and helping ensure that the Foundation incorporates this input.

Fabrice may be reached at fflorin at wikimedia dot org, as well as his userpages on the English Wikipedia and Mediawiki ([[User:Fabrice Florin]]). Oliver will be on the projects as [[User:Ironholds]] and [[User:Okeyes (WMF)]]; he can also be contacted directly via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Okeyes_%28WMF%29.

We’re very excited to be working with Fabrice and Oliver. Please join me in welcoming them!

Howie Fung Senior Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation

[1] http://www.ashoka.org/fellow/fabrice-florin [2] http://newstrust.net/about/bio_florin