Hi everyone,
I'd like to announce some changes in the Engineering Community
Team[1]. The headlines:
* Quim Gil is taking over as the new Engineering Community Manager,
effective immediately
* Sumana Harihareswara is stepping into a new role as Senior Technical
Writer, also effective immediately
The details:
The Engineering Community Team (ECT) is made up of Andre Klapper,
Guillaume Paumier, Quim Gil, and Sumana Harihareswara. We started ECT
with Sumana leading the group back in 2012. The ECT team has
flourished under Sumana's leadership. Our internship programs have
scaled up pretty dramatically, all of the while increasing in quality
of output and diversity of students. We've also gotten steadily
better in engineering communications, with weekly engineering updates
(translated even!) and great two way communication around software
bugs and other site issues. She would be the first to point out that
a lot of this was driven by members of the team, but she set up the
conditions for many of the team's achievements (e.g. getting us
involved in Outreach Program for Women, tirelessly recruiting and
nurturing new volunteers, and working with the team to hammer out
requirements for the new things they've rolled out).
Sumana led the team until taking a three month sabbatical to attend
Hacker School in New York starting in October of last year. In the
interim, Quim Gil stepped in to lead ECT. After coming back from
sabbatical, Sumana has decided that she would like to take on a role
with more of a technical emphasis to utilize her newly honed skills.
As it turned out, we also independently identified the need to hire a
technical writer (even going so far as advertising an RFP while Sumana
was out, though we weren't able to fill the role). Sumana's increased
focus on technical work combined with her background as a professional
writer made this a pretty obvious fit for the role. Her current
project is organizing RFC review[2] and documenting the process, using
the process for reviewing MediaWiki architectural changes as a means
for documenting our architecture.
Thankfully, Sumana hired a ready-made successor with Quim Gil, who was
until now our Technical Contributor Coordinator. In the past couple
of years, he overseen a big increase in the number of interns that get
involved in our projects via Google Summer of Code and Outreach
Program for Women. Quim has deep experience in engineering community
management, and kept things working really well during Sumana's
absence.
With Sumana moving into a different role that then one vacated by
Quim, Quim will hold onto many of his previous technical contributor
coordination responsibilities. So, for things you used to contact
Quim about, please still contact Quim.
Congratulations Quim and Sumana on your new roles!
Rob
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team
[2] RFC review:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment