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