Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board

Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project:

Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by just one person, Brion Vibber, who appears to have his hands more-than-full just keeping everything running. The entire system has been cobbled together as the site has grown, a messy mix of different kinds of computers and code, and keeping it all running sounds like a daily nightmare. As a result, actual software development goes rather slowly, which cannot help but affect the development of the larger project.

I can't vote in the election because it requires at least 400 edits, but I thought I'd pass along Swartz's announcement because he'd be an excellent choice for the board. I don't recognize any of the other 16 candidates.

Swartz has been a significant contributor to RSS for six years, which is remarkable considering the fact that he's not yet 20. He coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification and the RSS Content, Dublin Core and Syndication namespaces. He was a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and is a founder of Reddit.

Wikipedia · Rss · 2006/09/01 · 0 COMMENTS · Link