[Foundation-l] Announcement: Naoko Komura

[Naoko Komura]

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> Naoko welcome. Usability is a subject that is also of a particular
> importance to the "down stream" users of MediaWiki. Organisations like
> UNICEF, Kennisnet, Commonwealth of Learning and many others are investing
> and have invested in improved usability. I hope you will be interested in
> leveraging all this hard word and make it count even more. The tapes of the
> usability studies of UNICEF, who are in English by the way, are available
> to
> people working on usability. There is even a really good possibility for
> you
> to make use of the Tanzanian team who executed the UNICEF studies. There
> are
> many more opportunities...
>
> Given the size of the grant, there is this opportunity to make sure that
> the
> usability effort will not only lead to open source but also to open
> collaboration.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM


Thank you for sharing your wisdom, Gerard.  We definitely plan to study the
usability research done by other organizations.  Erik and I are in touch
with Merrick, and we are studying UNICEF's usability study methodology and
hope to view the recording of the actual usability test.  The funding for
this project covers our own usability test.  This usability test along with
the studies done by UNICEF and other organizations you had mentioned would
provide us the data for us to measure the gap between existing usability and
behavioral barrier in editing articles.  Then we carefully need to pick and
choose the appropriate changes to accommodate new users and translate them
into the the best technology we can offer, while making sure the changes are
acceptable to existing users at the same time.  The first three months are
dedicated for forming the team, commissioning the usability test, and
defining requirements.  The plan is to open up the newly developed software
in the test and lab environments for the early feedback for the new users
and the community.

I look forward to working with you and everyone in the Wikimedia community
to reduce the barriers and bring in new editors to grow the collective
knowledge on Wikimedia projects.

- Naoko




>
>
> 2008/12/6 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
>
> > I'm pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring Naoko
> > Komura as Program Manager for the Stanton Foundation Usability
> > Project. She will begin work on January 2, 2009, and her employment
> > contract with us will end on April 1, 2010.
> >
> > Naoko has worked for us in the past three months as a contractor
> > shepherding two important projects: the reader/contributor survey,
> > which was successfully launched and received tens of thousands of
> > responses, and the Wikimania 2008 postmortem analysis. She's also
> > project managed the fundraiser translation work, the development of
> > the Stanton Foundation grant proposal, and another grant proposal
> > we're actively working on.
> >
> > Naoko has worked as a Senior Program Manger and Project Manager for
> > Yahoo! Mail, Postini, and Cygnus Solutions. She has an MA in
> > International Development Policy from Stanford University and an MS in
> > Economics from Kobe University in Japan. She's a native speaker of
> > Japanese.
> >
> > I'm very pleased that Naoko has agreed to lead this important
> > initiative. Please join me in welcoming her!
> > --
> > Erik Möller
> > Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
> >
> > Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> >
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