Hello all,
I'm very happy to announce Rob Lanphier (user:RobLa) in his new role working as a
full-time Engineering Programs Manager reporting to me, effective yesterday (June 30th).
Rob first came to the attention of Wikimedia Foundation during the CTO search, and he has
been working under contract to Wikimedia Foundation for a some time now, acting as backup
EPM for the trial rollout of Pending Changes and also performing an audit of EPM tools
currently in use at the Foundation and in the larger FOSS world to determine the best
tooling strategy to increase both reliability and transparency of our engineering
planning.
In his new role, which is also new in the organization, Rob will be working with me to
build out core services that all of our engineering efforts rely on (such as Software
Quality Assurance, Documentation, Release Management& Analytics). Using EPMs to
assist the engineering teams in gaining the best outcome in their efforts to serve the
Wikimedia Community was pioneered by Naoko Komura on the recently concluded User
Experience project and its a practice we plan to broaden over the coming year. We would
usually expect WMF positions to be posted and boarded, but in this case Rob had responded
to a previous job posting and he was identified then as someone who would be of
exceptional value to the team. I felt it would be inauthentic to hold his hire for the
formality of posting.
Rob's longtime interest in Wikipedia (he is editor number 96), his long history of
managing high-profile open source engineering projects (he was at RealNetworks and Linden
Labs before joining us), and his general focus on patiently working through every
imaginable detail using methods that are both effective and community-inclusive make him
ideal for this new role. Rob has also proven to be very effective at working
semi-remotely; he comes into the office in San Francisco every other week and lives the
rest of the time in Seattle, Washington. As we grow the Tech team I believe it will be
advantageous for us to consciously create distributed teams both to mirror the composition
of the larger Wikimedia Community and to encourage even more collaborative working
patterns.
Rob has been a great addition to our team in the time he's been with us, and I look
forward to his continued contributions. Please join me in welcoming and congratulating
him.
Danese Cooper
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
danese(a)wikimedia.org