Friends with Benefits: How GroupLens and Wikimedia are Happier Together

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From left to right: Kyle Condiff, Sarah McRoberts, Aaron Halfaker, and Jacob Thebault-Spieker having lunch at GroupLens.

 

Aaron Halfaker peels back the gleaming foil of an overloaded burrito. Surrounded by doctoral candidates at the GroupLens lunch table, he chomps into his eagerly anticipated rice and beans, taking breaks to shoot the breeze or riff on research ideas. After earning his Ph.D. in 2013, Halfaker scored a full-time research job at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Yet every Thursday, he returns to hang out with us on the University of Minnesota campus. This is certainly an unusual arrangement…what keeps him coming back? (more…)