[Wikimedia Announcements] Arthur Richards joins Wikimedia

[Tomasz Finc]

Greetings,

I'm very excited to welcome Arthur Richards to the Wikimedia Foundation as the backend developer for fundraising.  

Back in the fall 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Arthur took a leave of absence from Oberlin College to work with a grassroots relief organization in New Orleans, Louisiana.  After finding a lot of discarded computer equipment in trash piles during cleanup, he rescued, repaired and rebuilt a handful of machines to open up the Common Ground Community Tech Center in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans.  Powered by Linux, a jury-rigged solar array and a back-up generator, the Tech Center provided a place for community members to check on loved ones, learn about computers and publish their own media to the web.  

After finishing school with a degree in History, Arthur headed to the Bay Area to begin a career in software development.  There he worked for a few months as a content manager and developer for YouthNoise.org, a forum for young people to become civicly engaged.  In 2007, Arthur left YouthNoise to try his hand at contracting.  His first gig was with NetAcceleration, maintaining and providing new functionality for a proprietary content management system.  Feeling a need to work with open source software and for social good, Arthur left NetAcceleration and co-founded Colingro Labs, a small web consulting company focused on non-profit, green and socially responsible clients where he fell in love with the Drupal content management system. 

Most recently, Arthur has been in Guadalajara, Mexico with Adapting to Scarcity, making a documentary on the effects of urban water usage on communities downstream from Guadalajara and offering digital storytelling workshops to youth in affected communities.  

Arthur will bring in some well needed drupal skills that will benefit our fundraising efforts with CiviCRM. He'll be working with our staff and the CiviCRM community to develop new features along with integrating our custom developments into the core distribution. He'll also be working extensively with our analytics team to better understand and present the various data sources that we have to both internal teams and the community at large.

He'll be starting a three month contract on July 6th and will be working in the San Francisco office. 

Please join me in welcoming Arthur to the Wikimedia team! We'll be setting up his email as his start day gets closer but until then, you can reach him at awjrichards at gmail.com.

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Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manager - Fundraising, Mobile, & Offline