Brion Vibber joins StatusNet

I'm excited to share some news today that has been in the works for some time now. Brion Vibber (@brionv) will be joining StatusNet, Inc. as senior architect starting October 12th. Brion will be leaving his position as CTO for the Wikimedia Foundation, where he's been lead developer for MediaWiki and the main technologist for Wikimedia's many great sites, including Wikipedia.

I have no doubt that Brion will be missed at his previous position. He has been a truly impressive technology leader for Wikimedia, guiding its Free and Open Source software, and Open Content works, from relative obscurity to some of the most important sites on the Web today. He has helped scale Wikipedia.org over many orders of magnitude of traffic in a few years, and also built the features that have let the Wikimedia community develop and grow during that time too. In the meanwhile, he has led the MediaWiki project to become the most important wiki engine, and one of the most important pieces of Web software, available today.

I've known Brion personally for six years, since I started Wikitravel. I've been continuously impressed by his ability to provide clear leadership to the Wikimedia and MediaWiki communities with a sense of humor and an easy-going and friendly attitude. Most of all, his commitment to Free Software and Open Content has been an inspiration to me and many others in the FLOSS community.

I think I speak for the rest of the StatusNet team in welcoming Brion. His work at StatusNet will be mostly architecture and development of the core StatusNet microblogging software, as well as ancillary services to support the status.net platform. He'll be crucial to the release of StatusNet 1.0 and the launch of the status.net public signup in the next few months. I also hope that his natural skills as a mentor and leader will help build our Open Source developer and user community.

Update: Brion's announcement is available on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.