Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Boneyard/Interviews desk/CTO

This week The Signpost was lucky enough to catch up with Danese Cooper, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Technical Officer (CTO). Since February this year, when she took over from Brion Vibber as CTO for all WMF projects, Danese has been responsible for overseeing much of Wikimedia's technical direction, including overall responsibility for "site, service, maintenance, upgrade, backup, disaster recovery, and technical support operations", software development and technical staff. We asked her a few questions about how she was finding her new job and about what the future may hold for Wikimedia.

'''Thanks for agreeing to speak, Danese. According to your Wikipedia biography, you enjoy "knitting in public". Would Wikimedia benefit from having more knitters, do you think? '''
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'You took over one of the two roles previously held by Brion (who will be well known to Signpost'' regulars) - never before has the WMF had an independent CTO. How have you found carving out this new role? What have you been up to?'''
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'''It cannot be easy being dropped into a well-established volunteer community. What qualities do you think it takes to be able to handle a community like this one well? Have you been contributing to project such as Wikipedia yourself?'''
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'''Before joining the WMF, you worked for both Intel and Sun Microsystems. How does working for the WMF, with its few dozen paid employees, compare to working for such large organisations?'''
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'''Overseeing the technical maintenance of a series of large websites day after day is not something that appeals to many people. What gets you up in the morning?'''
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'''The Wikimedia Foundation is not only committed to free content, but also uses free software and lists "open formats and open standards on the web" among its values. (For example, Wikimedia sites are a major user of the free Ogg format for audio and video on the web.) Can you spell out a bit what this commitment means for you as CTO? As an example, how to interpret the use of Flash for minor usability improvements (not involving patent-encumbered codecs)? Does all software used by the Foundation (even internally) have to be open source? '''


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'''It has been noted that your hire made Wikimedia the only top 10 website operator with a female CTO. Recently there has been much discussion on the Foundation-l mailing list about how to attract more women as contributors. You have often spoken about gender issues in open source communities. Could you share some insights that might apply to the Wikimedia communities, too?'''
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'''You recently said that the Foundation is setting up a new datacenter in Virginia and a second one on the U.S. West coast. Can you tell us a bit more about their technical purpose and current status, and perhaps about further infrastructure plans?'''
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'Looking at the bigger picture: Longtime Wikipedians might recall some pains in the past from shortages in the tech budget - in 2006 The Signpost'' asked Jimmy Wales "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers?". Given that the last Foundation fundraiser raised several million dollars, should we expect technical improvements that were enabled by this success, or is money no longer the issue?'''
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'''In your job, you are both responsible for WMF sites (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.) and for overseeing the development of the open source software behind it (MediaWiki). Is what is best for one best for the other? Is there any conflict between the two objectives?'''
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'''Wikia have done a lot of work on MediaWiki to improve the usability of their wikis and in May you said that you were in talks with them, to check if some of their code could used for Wikimedia sites. How has that been going, and which Wikia features are the most interesting from our point of view?'''
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'''You recently attended the Federated Social Web conference and the Foundation is interested in using social web features "as an aggregated 'social bus' for community activities". Could you describe some of the ideas being explored in that direction, and are there any concrete plans yet?'''
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'''The job description for CTO asks for improvement in "bug response time, code review response time, etc.", something that affects many developers, if not editors and readers themselves. Have you been able to establish a plan for achieving this long- and short-term?'''
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What is the best advice for a Wikimedia project that wants a particular configuration changed (or a feature developed) for their wiki?
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'Some weeks ago, the Signpost'' reported on a controversy (about a change that came with the new user interface) that led Erik Möller to observe "a widening gap between staff and volunteer contributions". Any thoughts about this issue in general? What is the best process to decide about software changes that might have a large impact on a project's way of collaborating, or the relationship between projects? (For example, it has been noted that one of the current Google Summer of Code projects has such potential.)'''
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'''Finally, in terms of growing Wikimedia's reach, do you see it as the job of the Foundation's technical team to provide stability despite growing communities, or to actively encourage this and, if so, how? Anything else you would like to share with Signpost readers?'''


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