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