[Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet

[Michael Snow]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/9/28 Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org>:
>   
>> I'd like to share some exciting news with you all... After four awesome
>> years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I'm
>> going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on
>> the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites.
>>     
> Congratulations on your new job, but I must confess to seeing this as
> bad news, rather than exciting news... I'm glad you intend to make
> your departure as smooth as possible, but it is disappointing that you
> couldn't stay full-time until there was a new CTO and handover
> properly. The Wikimedia movement is significantly worse off without
> you - I was really looking forward to you handing over the
> administrative part of your job and concentrating on coding, great
> things would have happened, I'm sure! However, I wish you the best of
> luck in the future and I looked forward to seeing you around here,
> even if it is a little less often.
>   
Fortunately, if you read Brion's entire message, the Wikimedia movement 
is not going to be left without him, and you will still be able to see 
him around (probably a little less often, yes). So I'm not sure why you 
finish up by referring to him in the past tense.

I certainly won't pretend that the Wikimedia Foundation is eager to see 
Brion leave its staff. But one of the things that's important to us is 
to make sure employees have opportunities to grow and develop, and in 
some cases that growth will lead them into new opportunities outside the 
organization. So with that I wish Brion all the best with his new job. I 
look forward to his ongoing contributions to MediaWiki development, and 
I hope that his other work will also add significantly to the free 
culture movement, so that it really develops an ecosystem and not just a 
couple of peculiar organizations.

--Michael Snow