Executive Director

Background
The Board has been discussing the idea of hiring one full-time staff member for OSGeo. This page is an attempt to describe the responsibilities of an Executive Director for the Foundation. An effort at a formal Executive Director Job Description has also been prepared, and to some extent superceeds this page.

Responsibilities
The Executive Director (ED) serves as an official point of contact for the OSGeo Foundation. The ED manages day to day operation of the foundation within available resources and defined policy. The ED communicates vision, policies, and status to the organization and the public. The ED coordinates activities with the various committees, projects, and members of the OSGeo. The ED reports status and takes direction from the board. The ED is appointed and removed by the board, and the ED generally manages other paid staff, exceptions possibly including contractors reporting to project PSCs. The Board retains overall responsibility for establishing top level policy, formal process, and final approval for project acceptance and graduation.

Responsibilities include:


 * Help manage communications for OSGeo - maintaining an issue tracker
 * Make the Board aware of issues in the community that need decisions
 * Act as a "mentor" for Committees in times of need.
 * Assist VisCom in organising presence + materials for events, maintaining an event schedule
 * Be an active member of the Website Committee and help work on the website and on promotional / explanatory documentation for the Foundation and its projects
 * Be responsible for mentoring and assisting fundraising process, grantwriting - both for FunCom and for project / committee directed sponsorship efforts.
 * Act as contact person for the "outside", receiving info@osgeo.org and routing requests to appropriate places
 * Help plan and implement running infrastructure needs

Please add what you think should be in-remit to this list! The point here is to come up with a clear job description eventually; but it would be helpful to overspecify rather than underspecify this.

Support roles
These are things that OSGeo needs people to be entitled and supported to do. An ED should work with others who are taking on the following responsibilities in their own regions and be available for these roles when needed:


 * Acting as spokesperson and coordinator for particular OSGeo activities
 * Acting as an "ambassador" for OSGeo at community and industry events

Powers

 * need to have some degree of spending authority (see Officer spending limits)
 * need to be able to decide how to allocate their own time within broad assigned priorities
 * should be able to take actions within current guidelines (for instance accept sponsorships according to a sponsorship policy once we have a policy)
 * should not be able to accept projects into incubation, or graduate them
 * should not be able to make major spending decisions on their own
 * should not be able to declare people charter members
 * cannot countermand or usurp the board or committees
 * not subject to direction by individual board members