[Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet

[teun spaans]

Brion,

congratulations on your new job, and you sound excited and happy with it, so
that is good :-)

But I must admit that I am sorry to see you go - your commitment to
wikimedia has always been over 100%, if such a thing is possible, and your
personality has always been a pleasure to work with.

teun

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> I've been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug
> reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I'm really excited at the
> opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we
> gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings.
>
> StatusNet was born in the same free-culture and free-software community
> that brought me to Wikipedia; many of you probably already know founder
> Evan Prodromou from his longtime work in the wiki community, launching
> the awesome Wikitravel and helping out with MediaWiki development on
> various fronts. The "big idea" driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in
> the modern social web -- pushing data portability and open protocols to
> protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services... People need
> the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping
> Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want.
>
> This does unfortunately mean that I'll have less time for MediaWiki as
> I'll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally
> anticipated, but that doesn't mean I'm leaving the Wikimedia community
> or MediaWiki development!
>
> Just as I was in the MediaWiki development community before Wikimedia
> hired me, you'll all see me in the same IRC channels and on the same
> mailing lists... I know this is also a busy time with our fundraiser
> coming up and lots of cool ongoing developments, so to help ease the
> transition I've worked out a commitment to come into the WMF office one
> day a week through the end of December to make sure all our tech staff
> has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes
> and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are. ;)
>
> We've got a great tech team here at Wikimedia, and we've done so much
> with so little over the last few years. A lot of really good work is
> going on now, modernizing both our infrastructure and our user
> interface... I have every confidence that Wikipedia and friends will
> continue to thrive!
>
> I'll start full-time at StatusNet on October 12. My key priorities until
> then are getting some of our key software rollouts going, supporting the
> Usability Initiative's next scheduled update and getting a useful but
> minimally-disruptive Flagged Revisions configuration going on English
> Wikipedia. I'm also hoping to make further improvements to our code
> review process, based on my experience with our recent big updates as
> well as the git-based workflow we're using at StatusNet -- I've got a
> lot of great ideas for improving the CodeReview extension...
>
> Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech
> management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I'll
> support the hiring process as much as I can, and we're hoping to have a
> candidate in the door by the end of the year.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
> CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
> San Francisco
>
>
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