Prospects of fundraising for an Exec Director..?

[Jo Walsh]

dear FunCom, 

I am not one of life's fundraisers, and probably shouldn't be
darkening your doors ;) However I have a question, which materially
only you can answer, I think.

The Board has discussed the possibility of hiring a full-time
Executive Director for OSGeo; there is a lot of favour behind the
idea. An ED could "pay their own way" in a pretty direct fashion, by
taking on the role of mentor/manager of the fundraising process. 

At the http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Thirteenth_Board_Meeting#Minutes
we set a prospective budget for this, and agreed that OSGeo would need
to have *at least* 3 months salary guaranteed (ideally more!) before
we could have a serious discussion about hiring anyone full-time.

I'm wondering if there's a Catch-22 situation in this. The Board can
work on a job specification, hiring process etc for an ED; but we
can't make any commitments without being 100% certain that the money
will be there in a sustainable way. While FunCom is running on
precious and short-supplied volunteer energy, its hive mind may just 
not be able to offer this kind of certainty... 

If this comes across as hassle-mail, forgive me; I intend a light
touch; I'd just like to be able to get a sense of what is likely to 
happen given the constraints we have; a gut sense of when OSGeo may 
have a solid enough foundation to support a fulltime staffer; whether
it would realistic to plan to hire an ED in October, or in the New
Year, or whether that's really visible to us from here at all. 

as ever your free-ranging kibitzer,


jo