About

Cindy Cicalese is the Founder and Consultant at Amethyst Collaborative Knowledge. She was previously a Principal MediaWiki Architect at Selfiie Corporation, a health tech startup. Before that, at the Wikimedia Foundation, she was a Principal Engineer on the Developer Experience Team and a Principal Engineer and Senior Product Manager for MediaWiki on the Platform Engineering Team aka Core Platform Team. Prior to joining the Foundation, Cindy was a Principal Engineer and Senior Technical Advisor of the Software Solutions and Technologies department at the MITRE Corporation. She also served as a tenured Computer Science professor at Marymount University. You can see her personal mediawiki.org page here as well as her former official Wikimedia Foundation page here. Cindy has developed software across a diverse set of domains including social semantic authoring, computer security, real-time robotics control, distributed systems, web applications, and more. Her doctoral dissertation research involved specification of distributed software component interfaces. She serves in a volunteer capacity on the Board of the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group. She has been involved in organizing and presenting at many of the MediaWiki users conferences.

In addition to her consulting work, Cindy has developed and continues to maintain a suite of open source MediaWiki extensions that are especially helpful for enterprise use of wikis, including:

• PluggableAuth – A framework for pluggable authentication and authorization extensions
• OpenIDConnect– Authentication using OpenID Connect providers
• EmailAuthorization – Authorization based on email addresses
• CommentStreams – A commenting system for wikis
• DisplayTitle – Enhanced display title handling
• TitleIcon – Add icons to page titles
• VersionCompare – Compare the software versions of two wikis side-by-side
• CreateUserPage – Automatically create user pages on login

Cindy is also an active contributor to Canasta, an open-source containerized MediaWiki distribution that packages MediaWiki with over a hundred extensions into a ready-to-deploy knowledge management platform. Amethyst Collaborative Knowledge is a sponsor of the project, and Cindy is available to help organizations evaluate, deploy, and customize Canasta installations.