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
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