With the growth of the Foundation has come numerous necessary upgrades from Office IT, in order to support more users. One of the most noticeable (and more appreciated by the staff) is upgrading the internet connection. Some groups can get away with bare minimum internet connectivity, but we simply cannot since most everyone needs a decent Internet connection for their work (imagine how hard it would be for the Ops engineers to work, if they couldn’t SSH). When I started this summer, the San Francisco office had three bonded T1′s, for a total of 4.5 megabits/second of bandwidth. Recently, we completed an upgrade to a 100 megabit fiber connection along with a replacement firewall, the Cisco ASA 5510.
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In the Wikimedia Foundation, we’ve got two technical groups: the Operations/Development crew (the group you are used to hearing from on this blog) and ourselves in Office IT (OIT).  The OIT group is responsible for the Foundation’s internal computing needs.  This includes things like fixing the printers, getting new workstations online, as well as just making sure the internet stays up so the staff can keep working.  We’re just like any other in-company IT staff.

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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

Wikimedia is hiring!  If you enjoy keeping an office full of tech gear and hardworking staff running smoothly, we want to hear from you.  We’re a mostly MacOS and Ubuntu shop with a bit o’ Windows thrown in. We have the standard backup, vpn and phone issues of any smallish office, and we have a satellite space that you’d be supporting as well.

Think this job has your name on it? Then read the full job description and application details here at the WMF site, and get your cover letter and resume in to us by May 11.