The Foundation announced yesterday that the new CTO is Danese Cooper. For those of you who were at eLiberatica in 2009, she was the one hosting the „lightning talks” session, which was a huge success. For the others, she is a FLOSS evangelist which worked for SUN, Intel and the less-known REvolution Computing.
What struck me in this choice is the change in profile from the previous CTO, Brion Vibber. Brion was the main code maintainer and submitter for Media Wiki for years. Without being totally sure, I think Danese is not very familiar with web programming, so she will likely be more of a supervisor and a coordinator than an active participant. This is somewhat normal and marks an evolution to a more organized, enterprise-like foundation.
This also means that most probably, the main code maintainer will continue to be Tim Starling, which hold the job since Brion left, last October. Good luck to both of them!