Open Source Diva named CTO Options

[anthony]

So who is this Danese Cooper? I see that David Gerard created her BLP in 2005. On that point alone I'm skeptical.

[Somey]

I doubt we'll ever know for certain, though Ms. Cooper could conceivably start blogging again (she stopped just before joining the WMF) and drop a hint or two. If I had to guess, I'd say it was her idea, not theirs - she probably got frustrated with being, for all intents and purposes, a glorified bandwidth optimizer and patch installer (applyer?), which wouldn't have been what she signed up for.

What she didn't stop doing (after being hired as the WMF CTO) was tweeting. At least half of her Twitter feed is about bandwidth and server problems being fixed, another 30 percent is her announcing her arrival at various airports, and the rest is just links to various OSS articles that (mostly) have little relevance to WP.

It was broadly hinted at here on WR 70 weeks ago (by K. Martin, myself, and others) that if her job was mostly going to consist of sticking band-aids on wounded servers, she wasn't a good choice for it and she wasn't going to be happy doing it. I'd say the victim here, if there is one, is probably Cooper herself. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that her job interview with the WMF board consisted of them reassuring her that she wasn't going to have to do any of the down-and-dirty stuff, and that she'd instead be concentrating on "high-level strategic technology planning" and various other things that the WMF has never cared about one iota.

If they were realistic about the nature of their organization, the WMF would give the CTO job to Brion Vibber and give him a nice big raise along with it. But they never have been, and in any event, Erik Moeller probably wouldn't stand for it.

[melloden]

I doubt we'll ever know for certain, though Ms. Cooper could conceivably start blogging again (she stopped just before joining the WMF) and drop a hint or two. If I had to guess, I'd say it was her idea, not theirs - she probably got frustrated with being, for all intents and purposes, a glorified bandwidth optimizer and patch installer (applyer?), which wouldn't have been what she signed up for.

What she didn't stop doing (after being hired as the WMF CTO) was tweeting. At least half of her Twitter feed is about bandwidth and server problems being fixed, another 30 percent is her announcing her arrival at various airports, and the rest is just links to various OSS articles that (mostly) have little relevance to WP.

It was broadly hinted at here on WR 70 weeks ago (by K. Martin, myself, and others) that if her job was mostly going to consist of sticking band-aids on wounded servers, she wasn't a good choice for it and she wasn't going to be happy doing it. I'd say the victim here, if there is one, is probably Cooper herself. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that her job interview with the WMF board consisted of them reassuring her that she wasn't going to have to do any of the down-and-dirty stuff, and that she'd instead be concentrating on "high-level strategic technology planning" and various other things that the WMF has never cared about one iota.

If they were realistic about the nature of their organization, the WMF would give the CTO job to Brion Vibber and give him a nice big raise along with it. But they never have been, and in any event, Erik Moeller probably wouldn't stand for it.

And unfortunately, this is one reason why Wikipedia hasn't really exploited its technical potential yet--it's being directed by non-tech people. People like Brion Vibber, who know MediaWiki in-and-out, should be the ones making the technical decisions--not Sue or Erik, to say the least. Sue is nothing more than a ruthless businesswoman--but when she dictates the WMF's tech directions, it usually ends up as nothing very special. The CTO could be responsible for so much more, given that the WMF has relatively few employees anyway but they have an enormous collection of tech and server stuff.

[Kelly Martin]

And unfortunately, this is one reason why Wikipedia hasn't really exploited its technical potential yet--it's being directed by non-tech people. People like Brion Vibber, who know MediaWiki in-and-out, should be the ones making the technical decisions--not Sue or Erik, to say the least. Sue is nothing more than a ruthless businesswoman--but when she dictates the WMF's tech directions, it usually ends up as nothing very special. The CTO could be responsible for so much more, given that the WMF has relatively few employees anyway but they have an enormous collection of tech and server stuff.

Spoken by someone who clearly knows absolutely nothing about technology in business. You don't want your techies making decisions about how to use technology in your business, because they'll just pick whatever technology they think is the coolest, whether or not it's the most efficient way to facilitate your business processes. The role of the CTO is to find efficient ways to facilitate business processes with technology. Brion is demonstrably unable to fill this role; as are both Sue and Erik, but all of them for different reasons.

What I'm wondering about is what Brion will do now that Danese is gone and he's back to reporting to Erik. Will he leave again?