Talk:Executive Director

Issues that may affect how we-the-board spec and recruit the position:

• Desire to avoid "volunteer indifference" of the kind which affected WebCom so directly when Daniel was chairing it:

 - ED would have a facilitator/support/mentor role, not 'manager' role

• Desire to avoid causing "member envy"; ED is a perception-of-kudos role, even if the reality is mostly gruntwork and overcommunication

 - We need to be transparent, accountable (which to me implies
   keeping as much of this public as we can)
 - ED ditto - totally open process, reporting, timesheeting, whatever.

• Desire to avoid "request overload" / bottlenecking for ED - they would wind up dealing with all manner of member and user support issues

 - ED's priorities should be 'sandboxed'
 - but we can't predict this upfront - depends on a person's skills
   and on the foundation's emerging needs and short/medium term focus

• Desire to make position self-sustaining - it's a really significant financial commitment. I wonder whether after the first year it would be viable to say 'okay we guarantee you half-time+benefits and the rest you have to raise for yourself through participation in grantwriting / admin / etc for project directed sponsorship through OSGeo'

Gestural outline plan for getting stuff done about this

• 1/ the Board reaches *consensus* on the need for an ED
• 2/ if 1/ holds, turn the wiki page into a real job spec and agree on it - this should have a stoppage time to focus minds?
• 3/ if 2/ holds, make a public posting of position - needs a window of probably 2 weeks for applications
• 4/ if 3/ succeeds, have a window of 1 week for us to decide - which means it has to be a time when no board members are unavailable...