Hello all,
it’s my great pleasure to announce that as of today, Toby Negrin is
joining the Wikimedia Foundation as the new Director of Analytics.
Toby will be responsible for leading the analytics team, which is
responsible for enabling data-driven decisions in the Wikimedia
Foundation and the broader Wikimedia community.
As of today, the team consists of: Diederik van Liere, Dario
Taraborelli, Andrew Otto, Evan Rosen, Dan Andreescu, Stefan Petrea
(contractor), Erik Zachte (part-time), and Aaron Halfaker
(contractor). Newly integrated into the team are Dario, Evan and
Aaron.
Toby joins us from DeNA (formerly ngmoco), a $2B Japanese mobile
gaming company where he was Director of Analytics in the US from 2011
to 2013. He enabled data-informed decision making throughout the
company, established an Insights team and scaled the Analytics team to
21 members. He managed a 300+ node Hadoop platform, multiple data
driven applications and led the effort to open source Mobilize, a
script deployment and dataviz framework developed in-house at DeNA.
Prior to DeNA, Toby was Director of Product Management for Cloud
Platforms and Hadoop at Yahoo! from 2008-2011. Leading 10 PMs at peak,
through this group Toby was responsible for interfacing between the
hundreds of internal users of analytics, storage and other cloud
services and the developers/maintainers of said infrastructure. There
aren’t many jobs that could prepare you for Wikimedia’s complex
network of analytics stakeholders, but this surely is one of them.
Toby has worked as a software engineer for many years and holds a BS
Equivalent in Computer Science from California State University, an
MBA from NIMBAS Graduate School of Management in Utrecht, and a BA in
Visual Culture and History from University of California, Santa Cruz.
After growing up in the Bay Area, Toby’s lived recently in Stockholm
and Amsterdam so he’s using his spare time to explore California’s
wilderness on two feet and two wheels with his family. His two
daughters keep him pretty busy!
Toby is looking forward to making the shift to a mission-driven
non-profit organization. When I asked him what he’d be doing if not
Wikimedia, he expressed an interest in urban planning, green cities,
and public transport. In an alternative universe, San Francisco is
becoming a greener city with a more reliable public transport system.
In this one, we get awesome Wikimedia analytics instead. There are
always tradeoffs. ;-)
Toby’s incredibly excited about working with the team to tackle
Wikimedia’s analytics challenges and the increasing hunger for data
across the organization and the movement. Please join me in welcoming
him on board. :-)
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation