Today I am pleased to announce the Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellows program, a project of the Foundation’s Community Department. This program is partly something the Foundation has been considering for a long time and partly an outgrowth of the recent Community Department open hiring call. In reading through the nearly 2,000 submissions to the open call, we realized that there are far more qualified members of the Wikimedia community than we can ever hire at one time. We also realized that the most promising submissions came from people who were interested in working on specific problems or opportunities in the movement rather than looking for permanent staff positions.

Therefore, the Fellows program is intended to create an environment where individuals and teams can concentrate full-time on important problems and opportunities in Wikimedia projects and the movement as a whole. Fellows will lead intensive, time-limited projects focused on key areas of risk and opportunity — projects that require the support of the Foundation to succeed.

We are currently looking for Fellows among those who have already answered the open hiring call and we will also be posting a form for submitting new Fellowship applications soon. In addition to Wikimedia volunteers, we would like to engage outside academics and professionals who have expertise that could benefit our projects.

Each Fellowship will have its own objectives that require a unique skill set. The length of the Fellowships at the Wikimedia Foundation will vary from weeks to as long as a year, depending on the requirements of the project. A handful of Fellows may eventually join the Foundation staff permanently. However, the purpose of the program is to take charge of vital work that may not require a long-term position but which volunteers have not previously dealt with successfully.

Along with introducing what will be a continuing Wikimedia Foundation program, we’d like to welcome the first Fellow in the Community Department: Steven Walling. Steven represents exactly what we’d hoped to attract through this process: talented Wikimedians who have a knack for crafting clear theories about how Wikimedia communities operate and how they can be supported. Steven’s previous experience as a freelance writer, blogger, and community manager make him an excellent choice to pilot this program. Steven is beginning a year-long Fellowship, during which he will work on multiple projects. He will be blogging about his projects as he continues.

We are deeply excited about the possibilities for the Wikimedia Foundation Fellowship program. Bringing in talented individuals who have specific projects in mind will allow us all to ask questions and solve problems that were previously out of reach for either volunteers or staff. I hope you’ll join us in welcoming Steven and more new Wikimedia Foundation Fellows as they are announced.

Zack Exley,
Chief Community Officer

Please join me in congratulating Mark Bergsma on his promotion last week to Operations Engineering Programs Manager.

Mark has been a volunteer since 2004, and a paid Network Engineer on our team since August 2006. He’s been helping us with our extreme scaling issues (by debugging and tuning our Squid setup, creating our Netherlands caching center, and generally developing our network strategy) since the very beginning. For some time now Mark has been unofficially in charge of managing the entire Ops Team’s deliverables including designing and implementing our new Primary Data Center in Ashburn, Virginia, and the other Ops activities mentioned here.

Mark has expressed an interest in gaining some experience with people management skills as a logical next step in his career, and to that end we will gradually add direct reports under Mark over the next year, starting with the Data Center Ops crew. He will continue to report to me until we hire a Director of Technical Operations.

I know you will do all you can to support Mark in his new role.

Danese Cooper
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation

At Wikimedia we are always looking to innovate – to try new things and see how they work. For instance, right now we’re re-thinking how we fill open positions in our newly formed Community Department. Rather than focus on traditional resources for hiring new talent, we have decided to put out a call to the broad, global audience that visits our projects. We’re focused on casting our net widely – in many languages and countries. Our goal is to find interesting people; people who have unique experience and skills and are interested in working with us.

In order to do this we’re going to try out a few different things, including the addition of a banner to our projects inviting people to Work at Wikimedia/Wikipedia. Keep an eye out for the banners.  If you’d prefer to not see them, just click “hide” and it will disappear into the background. If you’re interested though, click through and you’ll find a form with the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Here is some information from the Community Department outlining what they are looking to do with this call for submissions:

This year, the Community Department will be hiring for a series of important senior and entry level positions. All positions will involve collaborating and communicating with Wikimedia project contributors and users intensively and publicly, grappling with problems that no one has ever solved before, navigating technological and social challenges and opportunities, and dealing with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. Candidates should have extremely high levels of skill and comfort in communication (especially writing), qualitative and quantitative analysis, management and self-management. Candidates who are not already deeply immersed in online collaborative communities will have to show an aptitude for quickly gaining a deep understanding of our communities’ technologies, practices, traditions and culture — and to become trusted and productive members of the Wikimedia community and movement.

We are especially looking for:

Current Wikimedia community contributors, readers and leaders,

Insightful observers of Wikimedia and other collaborative communities,

People with specialty skill sets (e.g. statistics, ethnography, and probably a lot other things we’ve never thought of),

People belonging to language communities of new and growing Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects,

People with insight into reaching groups currently underrepresented in Wikimedia contributor communities.

Ideal candidates for positions at Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Department:

Have a passion for online communities, self-organizing systems, open and collaborative enterprises, democratic and consensus based societies, and emergent and participatory governance structures — and desperately want to see them succeed and prove the cynics wrong.

Have thought enough about this stuff to have their own opinions and theories on various problems and opportunities facing Wikimedia and other online communities.

Are equally strong dealing with qualitative and quantitative knowledge and research.

Are self-directed, self-motivated, efficient, upbeat, optimistic, and extremely good with people. Wikimedia Foundation staff face intense pressures in highly-demanding roles. While the Wikimedia Foundation team strives to be mutually supportive, it only works when each individual is self-driven to overcome the challenges they face.

Are knowledgeable about software development processes and with database and web technologies.

Are creative non-linear thinkers who will sometimes fight for seemingly crazy ideas by backing them up with logical argument and data.

Are systems-thinkers who love to think about workflow and technology systems inside organizations.

Are multilingual, especially in major world languages and languages with large or growing Wikipedias.

Have insights and experience reaching groups currently underrepresented in Wikimedia communities.

If you are interested in submitting your information for consideration for our Community Department please visit this page and fill out the form.

Thanks for your interest!

-Daniel Phelps, Human Resources & Philippe Beaudette, Community Department

Earlier today we announced two important new Chief Executive roles at the Wikimedia Foundation – our new Chief Community Officer (CCO) Zack Exley and our new Chief Global Development Officer (CGDO) Barry Newstead.

These are two brand new roles for the Wikimedia Foundation.  The CCO will oversee and lead the development of our relationships with key stakeholders of the Foundation and our global projects: donors, readers, and volunteer editor/contributors. The CGDO’s work will focus on leading the Foundation projects’ reach and growth globally, but with a particular focus on the Global South, a key goal of the Foundation’s upcoming five-year business plan.

We’re thrilled to welcome Barry and Zack to the Foundation – two highly experienced leaders and advocates who bring new capacity and energy to our movement.

Jay Walsh, Communications

With more than 100,000 active contributors globally, Wikipedia is one of the world’s most successful experiments in peer production. Volunteers have always made a collective effort to recruit new contributors, by welcoming new users, developing tutorials and help pages, creating promotional materials, meeting face-to-face, and so on. The Public Outreach department of the Wikimedia Foundation works in collaboration with volunteers and with the Foundation’s 20+ worldwide chapters to determine and foster the most effective approaches to public outreach.

With our recently announced Public Policy Initiative, we are developing a flexible model for reaching out to one specific target group: subject matter experts. Professors and students of U.S. public policy will be solicited to participate in writing and improving articles on the English language Wikipedia, and actively supported in their efforts throughout the the 2010–2011 academic year. We will thoroughly evaluate and document the initiative, providing a template for our volunteers to replicate its approach in other disciplines and other geographic areas.

Please visit the job openings page to read more about these and other employment opportunities at Wikimedia today.

Daniel Phelps, Human Resources

We’re currently looking for a Head of Office Administration.

The Wikimedia Foundation has experienced, and will continue to experience, growth and organizational change over the next several years.  The Head of Office Administration will be a senior administrative position based at our headquarters in San Francisco and will play a key role during this exciting period of change.  This position will be responsible for managing, planning, and coordinating various administrative business operations geared toward achieving internal operational excellence in support of the organization’s staff allowing them in return to focus on the success of our projects.

This is your chance to play a central role in the success of one of the most important knowledge projects in history.

Please visit the job openings page to read more about this opportunity and learn what it takes to be considered!

Daniel Phelps, Human Resources

Our very positive revenue perspective (we have already exceeded our fundraising targets for the fiscal year, and received a very generous $2M grant from Google) allows us to do something we’ve hoped to be able to do: make our investment in user experience (see original press release) permanent.

It makes obvious sense for any major website to have a permanent team focused on user experience improvements in the broadest sense. This includes eliminating obvious barriers to entry, but beyond that, we want to improve the experience as a whole for both readers and editors.

We’re now referring to this work as “user experience” (UX) work, which includes usability.

Naoko Komura will be Head of UX Programs, while Trevor Parscal will be the lead front-end developer on the team. Congratulations to both of them. :-) Naoko is currently assessing the remaining contracts and will share further information as these decisions are finalized.

In the immediate future post-April, we’ll be concerned with tying up loose ends from the usability initiative, and finishing functionality that we had to put in the parking lot. We’ll work on a roadmap and staffing plan for 2010-11 and beyond as part of our business planning process.

Our long-term focus will be determined in significant part based on the recommendations from the strategic planning process; see especially the community health recommendations.

While we haven’t finalized priorities, the single biggest piece of work is likely going to be the transition to a rich-text editor as the default editing environment for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis, particularly Wikipedia. But, user experience to us also means assessing how people self-organize and communicate in Wikimedia projects, how they get stuff done, and how they read and navigate our projects. Even among the areas of work we’ve already identified, there’s enough to keep us busy for many years. :-)

Please note that the original usability initiative hasn’t concluded yet. The team is working on its final release, which will include some of the most-anticipated changes, including collapsing of templates to simplify the editing interface, and the production release of the new feature-set to all users. As always, we’ll continue to communicate progress through this blog and the tech blog, and feedback and participation is welcome at http://usability.wikimedia.org/.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

I’m delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new Chief Technical Officer, Danese Cooper. Danese is an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.  You can read more about this great news in the Foundation press release that went out today.

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.

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 and developing Wikimedia’s open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to support 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.

We’d also like to thank the Walker Talent Group 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

I’m very pleased to welcome Priyanka Dhanda to the Wikimedia Foundation as Code Maintenance Engineer. Priyanka joins us from SourceForge Inc., where she worked since 2002 as a software developer and also was involved in operations, working on most pieces of the infrastructure, and integrating third party software with the SourceForge platform (including MediaWiki). Priyanka holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Toledo, Ohio, and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pondicherry Engineering College in India.

She is starting today and will work in the San Francisco office.

Priyanka will be a key interface between software developers and the operations team, helping us to catch up with our code and bug review backlog, to mentor new developers, to push projects to completion, and to improve testing and automation.  Please don’t swamp her immediately with requests as she’ll need some time to get more deeply oriented in the MediaWiki codebase. :-) You’ll be seeing her in the IRC channels, on SVN, Code Review, BugZilla, wikitech-l, and so forth.

Please join me in welcoming Priyanka to the Wikimedia team! :-)

– Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation