Dear Wikimedians,
Today we had a meeting at the Foundation to announce changes in our Product
and Engineering team structure. They represent the outcome of many
conversations with people from across the Wikimedia community and within
the Foundation. These changes will organize our teams around the needs of
people they serve, and empower them to focus deeply on their audiences to
deliver great outcomes.
We’re bringing together our Product and Engineering departments to form new
audience teams, reporting to Damon Sicore, our VP of Engineering. We’re
grouping core research, architecture, performance, and security functions
together, and will begin the search for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to
lead our engineering future. And we’re integrating support for Community
Engineering into the broader Community Engagement team. These changes are
effective today.
Earlier this year we set out some goals for our work at the Foundation,
described in our Call to Action
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Found…>
for 2015. These goals came out of conversations with you, and with
Foundation staff. You’ll see that the first thing we identified was the
need to improve our technology and execution. These goals focused on
defining commitments, data-driven decision making, support for community
engineering requests, and a commitment to engineering leadership.
The new changes reflect these commitments. We have organized our product
engineering around six teams each with unique audiences. This includes a
Community Tech team dedicated to supporting tools for core contributors, as
well as teams for Editing, Reading, Search & Discovery, Infrastructure, and
Fundraising Tech.
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.
We’re also committed to our long-term technology future. A new CTO will
support teams and functions dedicated to performance, architecture,
security, privacy, structured data, user experience, and research. Their
mandate is to keep Wikimedia fast, reliable, stable, and secure -- and to
support the Engineering team in their development of excellent products and
features.
You may notice there is no standalone Product department. We are moving
away from a matrix management structure. Instead, product managers,
designers, analysts, engineers, and others working together will report to
the same manager, who will report through to the VP of Engineering. This is
because we believe that everyone is responsible for user experience and
each team is ultimately responsible for delivering on the product vision
and a roadmap. It also gives teams ability to make decisions that are best
for their audiences, based on their user’s feedback. This represents a
maturation of our organization and processes, and will give each new teams
more focus, dedicated focus, and more support.
I want to thank everyone who has worked so hard to bring this new structure
together. Thank you to everyone in the community, for being thoughtful and
honest with your needs, criticisms and encouragements. Thank you to our
engineers, designers, researchers, and product managers, who have given us
extensive feedback about what works best for you. Thank you to our new team
managers and leads for stepping up into new roles. And thank you to Erik
and Damon, who have worked closely for many months to make this happen.
You can find more information about this new structure, the new teams,
their missions, and leadership, as well as other questions in a FAQ on
Metawiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Engineering_reorganiza…>.
We will update the Wikimedia Foundation site Staff page soon to reflect
these new teams.
~~~~Lila
tl;dr:[0] Please join the community review for six annual plan grant
proposals requesting USD $1.5 million in movement funds. Add your questions
and comments to the proposals until April 30!
Hello Wikimedians,
Round 2 of the Annual Plan Grants program [1] is underway, and the
Community Review process is open for your comments and questions. In this
round, six proposals were submitted to the Funds Dissemination Committee,
by the Centre for Internet and Society, Wikimedia Armenia, Wikimédia
France, Wikimedia Italia, Wikimedia Norge, and Wikimedia ZA -- with total
requests of USD $1,531,687. [2] These six proposals, developed based on the
organizations' annual plans, include programmatic and operational costs,
and are requests for general funding.
This year (2014-2015), the FDC has USD $6 million to allocate to movement
organizations to help advance our strategic goals. In Round 1, $3,817,956
was allocated to movement organizations, [3] leaving $2,182,044 for Round
2. In mid-May, the Funds Dissemination Committee will meet face-to-face,
prior to the Wikimedia conference, to deliberate on and then make
recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees about how to grant funds to
these organizations, in order to achieve mission-related impact.
We invite you and all other community members to review any or all of the
proposals, and to share your thoughts and ask questions on the discussion
pages of the proposals. General questions or comments can also be made in
the General comments section. [4] The community review period lasts until
April 30, 2015. Applicants are also expected to respond to comments and
questions during this period, although they are not able to change the
proposal form itself after the submission date. The FDC will review the
discussion pages and will use the questions and comments as one of their
many inputs into the decision-making process. To join other community
consultations, visit the noticeboard. [5]
You can join in by reviewing the proposals [2] and adding your comments on
the discussion pages. Proposals are available in English, but comments and
questions can be made in any language. As a member of the Wikimedia
community, your review helps make the grantmaking process more transparent,
collaborative and robust. Feedback and questions from the community are an
important input into the proposal review process, and the FDC considers
them seriously.
The major milestones for the rest of this round is as follows: [6]
* Community review: 1 April 2015 - 30 April 2015
* Staff assessments published: 8 May 2015
* FDC deliberations: 12-14 May 2015
* FDC recommendation published: by 1 June 2015
* Appeals or complaints submitted: by 8 June 2015
* Board of Trustees decision: by 1 July 2015
* Start of new grant terms: 1 July 2015
Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback about
the process. You can reach the FDC staff at FDCsupport(a)wikimedia.org
Warm regards,
Katy Love
Senior Program Officer
Funds Dissemination Committee
Wikimedia Foundation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_read
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Information
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2…
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2/Commu…
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Current_community_consultations
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Information#Calendar