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

I’d like to share some exciting news with you all… After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I’m going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites.

I’ve been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I’m really excited at the opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings.

StatusNet was born in the same free-culture and free-software community that brought me to Wikipedia; many of you probably already know founder Evan Prodromou from his longtime work in the wiki community, launching the awesome Wikitravel and helping out with MediaWiki development on various fronts. The “big idea” driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in the modern social web — pushing data portability and open protocols to protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services… People need the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want.

This does unfortunately mean that I’ll have less time for MediaWiki as I’ll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally anticipated, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving the Wikimedia community or MediaWiki development!

Just as I was in the MediaWiki development community before Wikimedia hired me, you’ll all see me in the same IRC channels and on the same mailing lists… I know this is also a busy time with our fundraiser coming up and lots of cool ongoing developments, so to help ease the transition I’ve worked out a commitment to come into the WMF office one day a week through the end of December to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are. ;)

We’ve got a great tech team here at Wikimedia, and we’ve done so much with so little over the last few years. A lot of really good work is going on now, modernizing both our infrastructure and our user interface… I have every confidence that Wikipedia and friends will continue to thrive!

I’ll start full-time at StatusNet on October 12. My key priorities until then are getting some of our key software rollouts going, supporting the Usability Initiative’s next scheduled update and getting a useful but minimally-disruptive Flagged Revisions configuration going on English Wikipedia. I’m also hoping to make further improvements to our code review process, based on my experience with our recent big updates as well as the git-based workflow we’re using at StatusNet — I’ve got a lot of great ideas for improving the CodeReview extension…

Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I’ll support the hiring process as much as I can, and we’re hoping to have a candidate in the door by the end of the year.

– brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco

Update: Evan’s announce is up on the StatusNet blog.

Back in 2005, Wikimedia brought me on as the Foundation’s first paid employee after two years leading MediaWiki development as a volunteer. Naturally as the only member of the tech staff, I started at the top: Chief Technology Officer.

In the 4 years since, we’ve gone from one tech employee to a dozen, from 50 servers to 350, from upstart novelty to established web juggernaut.

As our operations and our staff have grown over the years, so have my responsibilities. Beefing up our tech staff is in some ways just like adding servers to our data center — we can get more things done with less task switching, but scaling still has its overhead.

With the increase in administrative and organizational duties, I’ve been less and less able to devote time to the part of the job that’s nearest and dearest to me: working with our volunteer developer community and end users — Wikimedians and other MediaWiki users alike — who have bugs, patches, features, ideas, complaints, hopes and dreams that need attention.

The last thing I want to be is a bottleneck that prevents our users from getting what they need, or our open source developers from being able to participate effectively!

Multicore brain upgrades aren’t yet available, so to keep us running at top speed I’ve suggested, and gotten Sue & Erik’s blessing on, splitting out the components of my current CTO role into two separate positions:

As Senior Software Architect, I…

• maintain the MediaWiki development roadmap
• give timely feedback and review on feature ideas, patches and commits
• ensure that end-users and bug reporters are treated respectfully and that their needs are met
• get developers & users involved and talking at local and worldwide events as well as online
• represent the “face of the developers” interacting with our user community (both Wikimedians and third-party MediaWiki users)

As Chief Technology Officer, I…

• set high-level strategic priorities with the rest of WMF
• handle administrative management for the Wikimedia Foundation’s technical department & internal IT
  • budgeting
  • vendor relations & purchase approval
  • hiring & personnel details
• work with the fundraising side of WMF to seek out and make use of potential resources:
  • grants for projects we need
  • in-kind donations of infrastructure
  • sharing development work with like-minded orgs
• ensure that the operations team has what they need to address current and predictable future site needs
• ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly
• plan and implement internship programs and volunteer dev events both on-site and elsewhere

I’ll continue to act in both roles until we’ve found a satisfactory candidate to fill the CTO position (full job description will go up soon), at which point I’ll be freed up to concentrate on being a full-time Senior Software Architect. (Yes, I’ll review your patch!)

I will of course continue to work closely with our eventual CTO… the idea is to find someone who’ll make the decisions I would have wanted to if I only had time. ;)

– brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO and Senior Software Architect, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco

On Monday, Steve Kent will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation team as the Head of Office IT Support. Steve will take the IT support torch from Ariel as well as incorporating some new responsibilities that were previously shared by other staff. Ariel’s responsibilities will shift to software development work.

Steve comes to us with more than 20 years of IT systems management experience. He has been in similar roles with several organizations including; RR Donnelley, Charrette LLC, Communicomp and CMP Media. Steve was most recently the Director of Information Technology for Sandbox Studios located here in San Francisco.

Welcome, Steve, to the Wikimedia Foundation team.

Erik Moeller

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative