Hello all - I wanted to share the news about the Wikimedia Foundation's new
Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann. Please see below
for the note I sent to wikimedia-l yesterday about Selena and her response,
and join me in welcoming her to the movement.
Maryana
*****
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
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-welcomes-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 two firms 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 shares her own message with you below, and she can be reached
directly at sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org.
Maryana
Maryana Iskander
Wikimedia Foundation CEO
*****
*From Selena:*
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 sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org.
-selena
Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann. Please see below
for the note I sent to wikimedia-l yesterday about Selena and her response,
and join me in welcoming her to the movement.
Maryana
*****
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
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-welcomes-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 two firms 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 shares her own message with you below, and she can be reached
directly at sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org.
Maryana
Maryana Iskander
Wikimedia Foundation CEO
*****
*From Selena:*
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 sdeckelmann@wikimedia.org.
-selena