Wikimedia Technical Committee/Call for Nominations

Call for Nominations, 2018-06-04

We, the Wikimedia Technical Committee (TechCom), are looking for two new members to broaden the committee’s area of expertise. If you can think of anyone (including yourself) who may be a good addition to TechCom, please read on.

TechCom is the guardian of the integrity, consistency, stability, and performance of all software supporting the Wikimedia projects. It acts as the senior advisor and the convergence point of all decisions related to technical work that is strategic, cross-cutting, and/or hard to undo (see the Charter).

Traditionally, TechCom members have mainly been experts for MediaWiki core. We have been slowly growing the committee to get a broader perspective, and now want to try harder to cover our blind spots by starting this nomination process.

Some areas of expertise that we hope new members would bring to the table include: internationalization, deployment and releases, mobiles apps, security, performance, and analytics. We are also interested in expertise in areas at the fringes of TechCom’s scope, such as privacy, interaction design, and bug wrangling.

Of course, we will not be able to cover all these areas perfectly with the addition of just two people and we will likely expand the size of the committee further in the future. For now however, we want to be careful to not to grow the committee too quickly, so that we have time to adjust existing processes to a larger group.

TechCom members are expected to be available at least 4 hours per week for committee work. This includes meetings, administrative work, and technical work, and also taking care of the RFC process. As we evolve the committee to become more proactive, we also expect to spend more time drafting and discussing guidelines and policies.

You can find the list of current members on the TechCom page. If you would like to join, or want to nominate somebody else, please send an email to [mailto:techcom@wikimedia.org techcom@wikimedia.org] by June 18 with “Nomination for ” in the subject line. The email should contain an overview of the nominee’s skill set and experience as well as a short pitch explaining why this person would be a good addition to TechCom.

Nominations are now open until June 18, 2018; and we will review the submissions and vet the potential new members over the following weeks. We hope that we can announce new members before the end of July.

Daniel Kinzler,

Chair of the Wikimedia Technical Committee