Very happy to see you join the wikimedia world Selena !
Wishing you the very best in your new role. Feel free to reach out if
needed.
Florence / Anthere
Le 13/06/2022 à 19:12, Selena Deckelmann a écrit :
Hello!
I’m so excited to join you all, and I am grateful to Maryana and the
many people I’ve met on my journey to today’s announcement. Thank you
for this opportunity to introduce myself!
My grandfather was a TV repairman and I grew up watching him tinker
and fix things, but college was when I decided to explore electronics
and computers. I started college thinking that I would play jazz
violin and maybe get a chemistry degree! A year later, I’d learned
about the Internet which resulted in skipping classes to install Linux
from floppy disks, and landing a job at a help desk.
My first programming language was TI-Basic
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-BASIC>, and my second was C++. I
spent many years with Perl (I’ve had dreams in Perl!), SQL
<https://www.reddit.com/r/SQL/comments/doukj2/is_sql_considered_codingprogramming/>and
later Python, and I’ve dabbled with wikis, including Federated Wiki
and MediaWiki. I admire Ursula Franklin
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin>and love her book The
Real World of Technology.
As I explored computers back in college, I felt compelled to share.
The experience didn’t feel complete if I was alone. I vividly remember
the people I connected with – who mentored me, who I wrote software
with and who just listened. My love for the internet, its freedoms and
connectedness, came from discovering a world of knowledge freely
shared beyond anything I had imagined before.
During my interviews with Wikimedia, I felt that strong connection
again. I heard each person share their reasons for joining this
movement and their hopes for its future – often in the form of very
challenging questions!
In the last few years, I’ve worked on problems at the intersection of
Mozilla’s mission to help create an internet for the benefit of
individuals, and its business. Very recently, this work resulted in
shipping Total Cookie Protection, making several major changes to the
UX of Firefox and launching a small advertising business called
Firefox Suggest, designed with lean data practices from the start. I
loved doing this work because of the difficulty of it, how intensely
those involved had to work to understand one another and the
communities they served, and that my pragmatic optimism had a part to
play in getting things shipped.
I also reflected on this moment in my own life: I grew up in Montana
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana>, where I attended public
school. I love talking about, reading about
<https://www.caseyjohnston.net/ask-a-swole-woman-archive/2021/10/23/how-do-i-even-get-started-with-lifting-weights>and
sometimes doing weightlifting. I’m hapa
<https://www.janm.org/exhibits/hapa-me>, and I met the Chinese part of
my family as an adult. I think privacy and freedom
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2175406>are
intimately connected, and that exercising freedoms is a good way to
keep them. I’m married to a high school teacher, and I have two kids
who love to crash video meetings, including my interviews with the
Wikimedia Foundation.
All of that, together, is why I’m joining the Foundation. Wikipedia is
the promise of collaboration on the internet and the movement for free
knowledge made good on, in practice not in theory. I believe that
Wikimedia projects have successfully demonstrated a model that
produces trustworthy knowledge, and have created a home on the
internet that the world profoundly trusts. I want to help make and
ship things to advance free knowledge using the skills I have, while
also continuing to learn from this ever expanding community of people
all around the world.
I plan to follow Maryana’s lead, and will start by meeting many people
to really understand what we collectively need to create a global,
equitable and inclusive future for free knowledge.
Although I will join officially in August, I would love to hear from
anyone interested in sharing directly with me at
sdeckelm...@wikimedia.org <mailto:sdeckelm...@wikimedia.org>.
-selena
On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 10:09 AM Maryana Iskander
<miskan...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,
When I started in January, I shared with you that one of my top
priorities
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour/My_Incoming_Priorities>coming
to the Wikimedia Foundation was to actively step in and support
the Foundation’s product and technology teams while we recruited
executive leadership of these mission critical functions with a
new Chief Product and Technology Officer.
I am delighted to introduce you to Selena Deckelmann, who will be
joining the Wikimedia Foundation on August 1. She is based in
Portland, Oregon in the United States.
Selena is currently the Senior Vice President at Mozilla, where
she has been for the last nine years. She leads the Firefox
organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox
product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web
platform, and browser services.
I have gotten to know Selena over several months and also learned
from people who have worked with her over many years. She is known
for successfully driving change by getting stakeholders aligned
around what’s needed, and being seen as a trusted partner. Selena
has built strong credibility over many years with colleagues and
also with a broader developer community. She is described as a
leader who can make the tough decisions, develop skills, grow
diverse contributors, and inspire teams. She also has a great
laugh and looks for joy in her work!
As context for the recruitment process: given the critical need to
get this right, we used twofirms with global search expertise who
specialized in product/technology executive leadership roles. This
meant double the work, but allowed us to more quickly build a
large, globally diverse pool of over 500 candidates. Once we
identified a smaller number of finalists, they participated in
real-life case studies of some of our current challenges and met
with Wikimedia stakeholders over the course of many months.
As you all know, we have a highly unique and sometimes difficult
environment with a multifaceted mission, complex structure, and
often competing stakeholders. This is going to be a challenge for
anyone, especially given the steep learning curve at Wikimedia
(which I can confirm from my own experience!). I hope you will
sign up to help me successfully onboard Selena as she gets started!
Selena will share her own message with you shortly, and she can be
reached directly at sdeckelm...@wikimedia.org
<mailto:sdeckelm...@wikimedia.org>.
Maryana
Maryana Iskander
Wikimedia Foundation CEO
***
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-welcomes-selena-deckelmann/
Wikimedia Foundation welcomes Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product
and Technology Officer
13 June 2022, San Francisco — The Wikimedia Foundation today
announced the appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product
and Technology Officer. Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice
President of Mozilla, where she was responsible for Firefox. She
will officially join on August 1, 2022.
Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia
Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and
innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia,
one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 16
billion pageviews per month. They also enable more than 300,000
global volunteers to edit Wikimedia projects each month.
“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by
enabling individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex
challenges,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia
Foundation. “She has dedicated her career to open source
technologies for empowerment and inclusion.”
At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena
currently leads the Firefox organization of more than 400 people
responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions
including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She
oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements
including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural
changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking
Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as
Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various
other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior
Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and
Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering.
Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as
co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that
explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist
automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for
The Ada Initiative, an organization that was dedicated to
increasing the participation of women in open source and
technology communities. She was a major contributor to PostgreSQL,
one of the largest free and open source databases in the world.
“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and
technology is a critical enabler of making this true,” said
Selena. “I look forward to contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring
free knowledge mission.”
As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with
Wikimedia Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer
developers, researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s
2030 Movement Strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction>to
advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the
Foundation is focused on product and technology development in
service of our mission.
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