Hi everyone,
I'm happy to announce that we have promoted Sumana Harihareswara as
manager of Engineering Community group. Sumana started with us as a
contractor back in February 2011, initially in a targeted engagement
to help out with Google Summer of Code and with the Berlin Hackathon
last year. Later that year, as we interviewed people to bring in as
Volunteer Development Coordinator, not only did Sumana put in a strong
application herself, but recruited very worthy competition for the
role. After winning the role, she worked tirelessly to straighten out
many kinks in our processes around volunteer development and
systematically ensured that new volunteer developers get the
recognition and (if needed) help they deserve. She has also applied
focus and organization in many areas outside of her immediate purview,
for example, recently stepping in as project manager for Git, and
occasionally filling in for me when I've been unavailable for the
larger Platform Engineering organization.
The promotion to Engineering Community Manager isn't so much a change
in the way things are done here so much as an official recognition of
a vital role that she has already played for the past year. Sumana
has been working with Guillaume Paumier and Mark Hershberger under the
somewhat ad hoc group title of "Technical Liaison; Developer Relations
(tl;dr)", serving as lead of that group since last year. Under the
new "Engineering Community" name, this group will continue to serve
many roles: facilitating collaboration and communication between
Wikimedia Foundation and its employees and the larger Wikimedia
developer community, as well as facilitating collaboration and
communication between the Wikimedia developer community and other
Wikimedia communities.
Thank you, Sumana, for your hard work over the past year. I'm looking
forward to seeing what you and the group accomplish moving forward.
Congratulations!
Rob
