No idea what this is.
“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.” https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-welcomes-selena-deckelmann-as-chief-product-and-technology-officer/
Product AND technology?
Is that one of those deals where they put two positions together, expect one person to be able to do both jobs, then hire a woman for the job at half the salary?
Back in 2017 the WMF hired a “Chief Product Officer” (Toby Negrin). He left in January. https://www.crunchbase.com/person/toby-negrin Is he one of the officers they have to declare on their tax forms? In other words, is his salary information public? (I’m sure my wild and crazy brothers over on Wikipediocracy will be along shortly to find the links for us.)
(Okay, here is the page, and I’ll even do the first 990, here is 2016, Negrin is #16 on page 8.) https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ Anthony Negrin, Sr. director of engineering $192,018 must be Toby Negrin, Chief Product Officer.
There used to be a CTO (and Victoria Coleman still has her fanbase here – not to mention the coloring pages) but the last one, Grant Ingersoll, left in July. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chief_Technical_Officer
Here is Deckelmann’s social media: selena deckelmann@selenamarie https://twitter.com/selenamarie (NSFW)
Can’t find a job description. Closest one seems to be “product manager”. https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/4135630 Maybe those are only the garden variety jobs.
But if you look at the “staff and contractors” page, “product” and “technology” are two separate things. https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#product Meta doesn’t seem to be much help in this. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_positions
And who is this Selena Deckelmann? She was interviewed by Wired a few months ago. “Is Firefox OK? Mozilla’s privacy-heavy browser is flatlining. What it does next is crucial for the future of the web.” https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-mozilla-2022/
This does not seem to be a good time to be working for Mozilla.
Have you tried Firefox lately? It is completely unusable. I have used it exclusively for at least fifteen years, and in the last year had to stop. It just doesn’t work. Always updating, you can’t even use it. I think there was even an SNL sketch where Biden can’t use his laptop because it is “updating”. Had to be Firefox. But maybe they put all their resources into mobile? Well, I tried downloading Firefox to my cellphone after I got a question about it on Reddit, and guess what, it downloaded okay, but it would only speak to me in Russian. How can I use a cellphone browser in Russian? And why did it even do that? It seems pretty basic, if you want people to use your browser, that you don’t use Russian as the default.
According to the article:
Deckelmann says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people’s online browsing. “I’m not sure that what’s going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first,” she says…. adds that Firefox doesn’t need to be as big as Chrome or Apple’s Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. “All we really want is to be a viable choice,” Deckelmann says. “Because we think that this makes a better internet for everybody to have these different options.”
If Mozilla wanted to be viable, why were they using Russian? But I guess that’s one of the things that people traditionally want in a browser. That, and being able to look at the internet, instead of updating.
Well, we’ll have to see if any of that old Firefox energy will be harnessed for Wikipedia.
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Oh and I have finally been able to see her “Linked In”, which seems to be set to some kind of private mode, or maybe I just don’t know how to use it. You can google it, and then access it from google. https://www.linkedin.com/in/selenadeckelmann?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Gender Desk 