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

[Mike.lifeguard]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Sue Gardner wrote:
> 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.

This is such great news! Congratulations to everyone: The hiring team
for finding such a great person to join the Foundation staff in such a
critical role, Danese for finding a great place to work, and all the
helpers in between that made the process successful.

I'm thrilled to hear that Danese will be starting work so soon, and that
"filling some key staffing gaps" will be at the top of the agenda. The
tech priorities we have currently show, I think, that the Foundation is
truly matured. Instead of dealing with short-term emergencies, now we're
looking forward to long-needed backup capabilities, and growing a second
datacentre. Instead of new toy software features, we're concentrating on
a strong code review and quality assurance process, and major
enhancements targeted to meet wider strategic goals. As frustrating as
the upcoming tasks are (and they have been thorns in someone's side
since Wikipedia was founded, in some cases) it should be an enormous
source of pride that those are what's being tackled.

Welcome, Danese! Hold on your hat :D

- -Mike
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAktjIscACgkQst0AR/DaKHuj7ACg0/UQ2jGNuLKpH+cgIPBNC/4z
f1IAnjRCWmKQ9L/FER96CVxqgzaXjmBV
=QJXF
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----