[Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO

[Platonides]

Crossposting to wikitech.
Welcome Danese!

Sue Gardner wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief
> Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager
> and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on
> February 4, 2010.
> 
> As you know, we've been searching for a CTO since last fall, when
> Brion announced his decision to leave Wikimedia for StatusNet. We were
> looking for someone with plenty of leadership experience and a deep
> understanding of open source technology, who could lead our technical
> staff, evangelize on behalf of Mediawiki, and set up systems and
> processes to help our staff and Wikimedia technology volunteers work
> successfully together. Danese fits the bill on all counts: I'm very
> happy she'll be joining us.
> 
> Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most
> recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up
> REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open
> Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source
> Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she
> led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun's
> OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans,
> GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel's Channel Software Operations and
> Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed
> technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of
> nine years.
> 
> Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit
> organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves
> open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache
> Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for
> Mozilla. Danese has lived and traveled internationally, particularly
> in developing countries, and speaks several languages, including
> French and Moroccan Arabic.
> 
> As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the
> other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a
> technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the
> development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including
> MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects
> to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and
> participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly
> important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer
> community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve
> people in multiple geographies and languages.
> 
> All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially,
> Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading
> the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring
> predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring,
> APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data
> centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job
> and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting
> her.
> 
> Danese will begin her work February 3. Until June 30, Danese has a
> standing one day/week commitment to support the code review process of
> the SETI Institute.
> 
> Finally, I want to thank the Walker Talent Group
> (www.walkertalentgroup.com) for its pro bono work helping recruit
> Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing
> Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated.
> 
> Sue Gardner
> Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation