Hi everyone,
We are very pleased to be making three big announcements:
1. The Platform Evolution (PE) cross-departmental program (CDP) is approved in the annual plan for next fiscal year.
This PE CDP was developed with input from staff across our organization in the Audiences and Technology Working Group. Together, these staff worked to identify some of our most pressing issues while opening healthy discussions between both departments and WMDE.
Along with the other Technology programs funded in the annual plan, funding of this program represents a renewed commitment by the Foundation to the long term health of the technology that is key to supporting our mission, staff and communities.
2. We are creating the Core Platform team, a new converged platform and services team to be the focus of the Platform Evolution CDP.
We are doing this in order to better support the PE CDP and begin the hard work of re-architecting our technology stack into a more sustainable and flexible platform, in support of the Wikimedia movement strategic direction. The MediaWiki Platform team alongside the Services Platform team hold some of the most senior technologists of our community. Their skill sets and experience are vitally important for the success of the CDP so they will be moving into the new Core Platform team. We want to thank Tim Starling and Marko Obrovac for their hard work, leadership and dedication which has brought us to this point. They and their teams are doing incredibly important work to sustain our software stack day in day out while also looking into the future and guiding the reengineering of our platform to support the mission for the years ahead.
3. Corey Floyd will be joining the Technology Department to lead the Core Platform team.
In addition to day to day management, Corey will operate in the program management capacity for the PE CDP. Corey was instrumental in formulating the PE CDP, assembling the program through extensive needs analysis, synthesis, and collaboration with Foundation team members and WMDE. He brings a proven track record in clarifying stakeholder needs and translating them into amazing products.
As many of you know, Corey started at the Foundation as an iOS engineer, was promoted to manage the iOS and Android native apps engineers who worked tirelessly to evolve the open source apps into award winners beloved by millions of our users, and has been operating in an
engineering product owner capacity for the Infrastructure team within Audiences-Readers. He is known for his work ethic, thought leadership, real world experience, and collegial spirit.
Audiences will be working to backfill the duties of Corey in Apps engineering management and Reading Infrastructure product ownership, and work is already underway to close these gap in conjunction with Corey’s cutover to Technology.
We’re happy to make the Platform Evolution CDP official. And please join me in welcoming Corey to Technology, where he’ll transition on July 1, 2018. We’ll be sharing more updates about the team and the PE CDP in the coming weeks.
We are incredibly excited!
Victoria and Toby