Hi folks,

It’s my great pleasure to tell you that Rachel diCerbo is joining us as Director of Community Engagement (Product), starting today. In this role, Rachel will manage the community liaison team (Keegan Peterzell, Sherry Snyder, Nick Wilson, and Erica Litrenta) and ensure that our technical projects receive community engagement support throughout their development.

Rachel discovered her love for collaborative communities with Couchsurfing. When she joined the community in 2005, Couchsurfing was a small non-profit, with essential functions being filled by volunteers. This included responding to safety issues: staying at someone else’s home or hosting a stranger carries risks, some obvious, some less so. Rachel founded and led the community’s all-volunteer safety team. She was also a member of the non-profit’s Board of Directors from 2007-2011.

After volunteering for two years, she joined the organization full-time as Head of Trust & Safety in 2008. She was responsible for enacting policies related to incident reporting, profile removal, and other safety issues, and handled any high level legal issues and communications related to Couchsurfing member safety. She implemented training, documentation, and case review processes for her team.

As part of her role, she also directly interfaced with Couchsurfing’s engineering team and helped scope functionality related to safety & moderation. The work on the safety team also equipped her well for working across culture and languages, as issues would often arise around differing cultural sensitivities. She’s travelled to 38 countries and lived on 5 continents.

Prior to Couchsurfing, Rachel pursued a passion for theater while temping in various roles for various companies. Her additional interests include digital rights, women’s rights and safety worldwide, and scuba diving. In her spare time, she seeks to perfect her pulled pork recipe, sews, and reads all the things.

Rachel is new to the community, and due to the nature of her role, she’ll be spending some time just learning how to edit and how things work in our weird & wonderful world. She’s planning a face-to-face meeting with her team the week of June 9th and will be attending WikiConference USA later this week.

Please join me in welcoming Rachel to the Wikimedia Foundation and to the community.

Warmly,

Erik

PS: Big thanks to everyone who’s been part of the search process, to the liaison team for doing awesome work in an emerging structure, and to Philippe, Maggie and Howie for all their work in bootstrapping the team, and for supporting Rachel as she steps into the role. :-)