Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce that we have appointed two contractors to take over the running of our technical resources: Emmanuel Engelhart (User:Kelson) and Tom Morton (User:ErrantX).
Tom and Emmanuel bring a well-balanced mix of technical experience and expertise to Wikimedia UK, including software development, project management and system administrator experience. They are already familiar with developing and maintaining the open-source tools that Wikimedia UK uses on a daily basis, and they also both bring valuable experience of the global Wikimedia movement.
Following the first discussion meeting on Friday, Tom and Emmanuel will first be focusing on transferring the Wikimedia UK websites from the space we currently use on a donated Virtual Private Server to a cloud-based system. They will then be working to improve our systems, including a new email ticketing system and migrating our fundraising systems to Drupal/CiviCRM. You can see their to-do list here.
Their work will be line managed by Jon Davies, with Katherine Bavage acting as their first point of contact on a day-to-day basis. A Wikimedia UK Technology Committee is being established to provide Jon and Katherine with guidance on Tom and Emmanuel’s contract work, as well as to help define the long-term strategy for increasing our technology infrastructure and development work. If you are interested in being on this committee, please get in touch via the committee’s talk page.
We’re all looking forward to seeing their work at first hand.
Welcome, Thomas and Emmanuel, to these new roles – look forward to seeing your contributions. 🙂 I know it’s not the first item on the list, but Moodle & MediaWiki integration sounds exciting; the WikiEducator folks might be interested in that as well (they use MediaWiki and have a Moodle setup). See http://moodle.wikieducator.org/ – let me know if you want an intro at some point.