CAcert Teams

Teams

The Community is structured around many teams doing various areas. Each team generally has a team leader, who liases with the Committee of CAcert Inc, a.k.a. the Board, the executive of the Community. Teams also work to the policies, and are occasionally subject to Arbitrations.

Thus there are three centers of gravity in CAcert's community: the board, the policy group and the arbitration forum. These three centers are peers in power, all interlocked, and in some senses mirror the political structures found in some countries: the executive ("presidency"), the parliament ("makers of laws") and the judiciary (courts).

Every team is defined by some service/task/product/role for CAcert services (the products) within and for the Community. Currently there are:

Leaders

Every team will have several people sharing tasks. One of those will take or is acknowledged as the lead and is referred to as leader.

Name of Team

Description of TL's role

Short

Document

Team Page

status

person

(Individual) Assurance

AssuranceOfficer

AO

AP

AssuranceTeam

filled

Ulrich Schroeter

Organisation Assurance

OrganisationAssuranceOfficer

OAO

OAP

OrganisationAssurance

filled

Marcus Mängel

Education

EducationOfficer

EDU

HB?

EducationCampus

filled

Bernhard Fröhlich

Assurance Events

Event Teams Leader

EO?

HB?

UpcomingEvents

filled

Walter Güldenberg

Community (&) Communication

to be defined

to be defined

-

-

Marketing Arsenal

to be defined

to be defined

-

-

Privacy

PO

PP

vacant

Dispute Resolution

ArbitrationForum

ARB

DRP

Arbitration Forum

filled

Lambert Hofstrah

Documentation

DocumentationOfficer

DocO

?

(none)

filled

Philipp Dunkel

Policy

PO

PoP

(none)

unfilled

to be defined

application engineering

AppEng

SP

SystemAdministration

filled

Philipp Gühring

Software Development

SoftO

SP

SoftwareDevelopmentTeam

filled

Philipp Gühring

Support

Support Team Leader

SptO

SP8

Support/Team

filled

Michael Tänzer according to m20100222.1

Critical Services

Crit? sysadm?

SP

SystemAdministration

filled

Wytze

Infrastructure

infra

?

SystemAdministration

vacant

Mario Lipinski according to m20100829.5

Access Engineers

provides access to secure site

AE

SP

?

open

?

Things that aren't picked up by people might be the responsibility of the board, but in general this means they are in danger of being done weakly or not at all:

FAQ

The following is some basic questions on how our teams work.

What does a Team Leader have to do?

How can I take part in a CAcert Team?

There is no special or guaranteed or written path. In general, help a lot and join the team informally. Contact the team Officer as shown in the chart, and ask. If there is no team, do *something* in CAcert, help make it known (contact any Officer). Then suggest you try this and that on your area. Finally, you can write to cacert-board@co and ask team-related questions.

Start informing yourself about the area. Read through the wiki on that area. Look for the list of outstanding tasks. Help on the outstanding tasks. Subscribe yourself to any of the CAcert email lists and take part.

Also, join the Association, as per m20070917.8 which says that "(Non-board operational) Officers of the project of the organization should be members of the association CAcert Inc.; the Board can make exceptions to this rule."

How do I resign from being a role?

Please contact and inform everyone in your team, other leaders and the board.

There is of course a conflict here. Everyone must put their life, family, job first. But we also have a responsibility to hand over the task to others. The minimum is to let us know, so we can pick it up. Ideally, work with the team or someone else to help the transition.

If there are any critical assets then it is your responsibility to hand those over, and this requirement is independent of the circumstances.

Conflicts of Interest

To protect our community and to protect yourself, leader should:

  1. declare any potential conflicts of interest
  2. expect these to be reviewed, and
  3. possibly re-engaged in another area.

Especially security areas are sensitive to these restrictions. Each leader is expected to clearly describe any potential conflicts of interest. This is as much to protect you as it is to protect the community; your work boss may ask you to do things that you might have trouble refusing, and these things may cause a breach of CCA/SP, a breach of the law, or a breach of our principles. We can much better deal with these conflicts if they are known about and thought about in advance.

Historical

In the period of 2006 to 2008, CAcert built out its organisation structure by appointing officers to various tasks. This area was initially managed by Advisory then by ManagementSubCommittee (M-SC) and ultimately by Board.

Every Office was defined by some service/task (a product) for CAcert services (the products) within and for the Community. Every Office would have certain persons from the Community taking up some task in the Office. One of those persons will take or is acknowledged as the lead and is referred to as Officer. Historically, there was also some writing about ProductManagers, but this never worked out.

An old organigram is found here: Organization Structure Chart (PDF format).

As of 2009 there was general agreement at the board level that the Officers process was causing as many problems as it was solving, and the term was dropped from general management. To some extent, we started using the term team leader to refer to the same thing. The emphasis was changed from one person to one team.


Inputs & Thoughts


Links: [1] https://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/Education/Organization%20Structure.png


Officers (last edited 2011-07-21 16:34:36 by UlrichSchroeter)