wikimedia.orgThe Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce that Damon Sicore will be joining the Foundation in the newly created role of Vice President of Engineering. Damon brings nearly two decades of engineering and product experience to Wikimedia, the non-profit organization responsible for Wikipedia -- the world’s fifth most visited website, serving half a billion readers every month.
Damon will manage the Foundation’s engineering team dedicated to ensuring the development, scale, and reliability of Wikimedia’s technical architecture. Before joining Wikimedia he spent six years at Mozilla Corporation, three of them as Vice President of Engineering, where he led a team of more than 600 open source software engineers, technical leads, managers, and directors in developing Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla open source platform, Firefox for Android and Firefox OS. Under his leadership Mozilla delivered some of their most significant browser releases and launched Mozilla’s entry into mobile with Firefox OS.
“Damon has extensive experience with high-scale, open source technologies and an intrinsic understanding of our mission and values,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Lila Tretikov. “He brings organizational and scaling skills necessary to improve and innovate for our communities of contributors and the next generation of knowledge seekers.”
Most recently, Damon led engineering at Edmodo, an emerging platform for sharing educational content for teachers and students, where he oversaw and grew the company’s web, platform, and mobile engineering, security, IT operations, support, and QA efforts.
"The Wikimedia projects are front and center in the fight for free knowledge, and that’s why I am here,” said Damon Sicore. “I'm looking forward to challenging us to ensure our software is up to the task. We need to move fast and produce the high quality software and services our users will love. It's what the world expects and deserves from us.”
Damon joins the Wikimedia Foundation as part of planned growth of the organization’s technical capacity, first announced in November 2012. Erik Moeller, who has filled the role of Vice President of Product and Engineering since 2011, will continue to focus on product in the role of Vice President of Product and Strategy.
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The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Across its 287 language versions, Wikipedia contains more than 32 million articles. Every month, roughly 80,000 active volunteers contribute to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. According to comScore Media Metrix, the projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive 413 million unique visitors per month on desktop alone, making them the fifth-most popular web property worldwide (July 2014). Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Wikimedia Foundation Press Contact:
Katherine Maher