On Mar 17, 2014 5:00 PM, "Rob Lanphier" robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'd like to announce some changes in the Engineering Community Team[1]. The headlines:
- Quim Gil is taking over as the new Engineering Community Manager,
effective immediately
- Sumana Harihareswara is stepping into a new role as Senior Technical
Writer, also effective immediately
The details: The Engineering Community Team (ECT) is made up of Andre Klapper, Guillaume Paumier, Quim Gil, and Sumana Harihareswara. We started ECT with Sumana leading the group back in 2012. The ECT team has flourished under Sumana's leadership. Our internship programs have scaled up pretty dramatically, all of the while increasing in quality of output and diversity of students. We've also gotten steadily better in engineering communications, with weekly engineering updates (translated even!) and great two way communication around software bugs and other site issues. She would be the first to point out that a lot of this was driven by members of the team, but she set up the conditions for many of the team's achievements (e.g. getting us involved in Outreach Program for Women, tirelessly recruiting and nurturing new volunteers, and working with the team to hammer out requirements for the new things they've rolled out).
Sumana led the team until taking a three month sabbatical to attend Hacker School in New York starting in October of last year. In the interim, Quim Gil stepped in to lead ECT. After coming back from sabbatical, Sumana has decided that she would like to take on a role with more of a technical emphasis to utilize her newly honed skills. As it turned out, we also independently identified the need to hire a technical writer (even going so far as advertising an RFP while Sumana was out, though we weren't able to fill the role). Sumana's increased focus on technical work combined with her background as a professional writer made this a pretty obvious fit for the role. Her current project is organizing RFC review[2] and documenting the process, using the process for reviewing MediaWiki architectural changes as a means for documenting our architecture.
Thankfully, Sumana hired a ready-made successor with Quim Gil, who was until now our Technical Contributor Coordinator. In the past couple of years, he overseen a big increase in the number of interns that get involved in our projects via Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Quim has deep experience in engineering community management, and kept things working really well during Sumana's absence.
With Sumana moving into a different role that then one vacated by Quim, Quim will hold onto many of his previous technical contributor coordination responsibilities. So, for things you used to contact Quim about, please still contact Quim.
Congratulations Quim and Sumana on your new roles!
Rob
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team [2] RFC review: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Congratulations to both of you.
-bawolff