Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wmfall] Announcing the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Engagement team

Hello everyone, to better serve the technical communities that build free and open source software for the movement as well as the communities who use Wikimedia's APIs to interact with our projects, the Wikimedia Foundation is making some structural changes. The Technical Engagement team is a new team in the Technology department of the Wikimedia Foundation reporting to the Foundation's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Victoria Coleman. This new team has two sub-teams: the Wikimedia Cloud Services team and the Technical Advocacy team. Bryan Davis will manage the Technical Engagement teams. He will also lead the hiring process for a new Developer Advocacy Manager position, which will take over some of the management duties. The Wikimedia Cloud Services team will continue to focus on maintaining the Wikimedia Cloud VPS infrastructure as a service <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Infrastructure_as_a_service_.28IaaS.29> platform, the Toolforge platform as a service <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service> project, and additional supporting technologies used in the Cloud Services environment such as the Wiki Replica databases and the hosting infrastructure for dumps.wikimedia.org. The existing team of Andrew Bogott, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez, Brooke Storm, and Chase Pettet will be joined by James Hare in the role of Product Manager. The team is also hiring for a fifth Operations Engineer and for a part-time technical support contractor. The Technical Advocacy team will focus on creating improved documentation for Wikimedia APIs and services as well as providing support for technical contributors and API consumers. The new team is being formed by moving the Foundation's Developer Relations team to the Technology department, with the exception of Rachel Farrand who will remain in Community Engagement in close collaboration with other event organizers. Andre Klapper and Srishti Sethi are both taking the role of Developer Advocate in the new team. A developer advocate is someone whose primary responsibility is to make it easy for developers to use a platform. Typically they do this by producing example software, tutorials, and other documentation explaining how to use the platform's products and services. Sarah R. Rodlund will also be joining the team as a Technical Writer. Technical writing has many subspecialties. Sarah will be focusing on improving our existing documentation by helping create a style guide and editing existing documentation to fit with that guide. She will also be supporting volunteers who are interested in practicing their technical writing skills on Wikimedia documentation. The team will be hiring for a Developer Advocacy Manager role in July. This new person will help round out the skills of the team and will take the lead in developing their programs. The Technical Engagement team will work with other teams inside the Wikimedia Foundation as well as groups at affiliate organizations and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to provide technical outreach services and support. We hope to continue to grow the number of people involved in our programs until we can confidently say that we are providing the best help possible to the hundreds of volunteer developers, designers, technical writers, and end users of the Wikimedia movement's APIs and services. We will continue to be involved in existing programs to attract and support new technical contributors like the Wikimedia Hackathons, Outreachy, and Google Summer of Code. We also hope to find new ways to connect with new and existing technical contributors as we support the Wikimedia movement's 2030 strategic direction and the shared goals of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. Very excited to be getting started down the path of strengthening our developer advocacy program! Best wishes, Victoria Coleman Chief Technology Officer Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104 +1-650-703-8112 vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wmfall mailing list Wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall