• Officers

Officers

CAcert is currently building out an organisation structure to better manage processes and work flow. This area is managed by ManagementSubCommittee (M-SC).

The CAcert organisation is divided in two overlapping areas: CAcert Inc. as association with a formal Committee (Board) and formal Sub-Committees (currently only the Management-Sub-Committee). The other part is the CAcert Community Membership with three departments of Offices: technical Offices, business service Offices and policy Offices.

Every Office is defined by some service/task (a product) for CAcert services (the products) within and for the Community. Every Office will 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.

Several Officers in an office manage processes/tasks operating in horizontal areas of the organisation as described below. A subset of these are product managers for the various certificate authority products we have, and are described in the ProductManagers page. This arrangement may form some type of a matrix organisation, with officers operating horizontally and product managers operating vertically (or is the other way around?).

The currently approved organization structure including our Offices is available as a Organization Structure Chart (PDF format).

(this table needs small updates and cell completion)

Refer also to ProductManagers.

Notes:

• Structure is approved as shown in the chart.
• Please don't add new lines without reference to board, as officers have to be approved.

FAQ

The following is some basic questions on Officers and on ProductManagers.

What does an Officer have to do?

• Provide reports on request by the Board or M-SC. (E.g. Officers were invited to 'TOP' meeting in September 2007 to provide reports to the Board.)
• Keep these wiki pages up to date in their area.
• Look out for new team members and help them to contribute.
• Share problems, ask for help.

How can I take part in a CAcert Office?

There is no especial or guaranteed path. In general, join the team and help a lot (contact the team Officer as shown in the chart). 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 (contact the M-SC or HumanResourcesOfficer).

Start informing yourself about the 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 an Officer role?

Please contact and inform everyone in your team and the other Officers. Although we cannot expect it every time, we would appreciate the time and care to hand over the role. 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, Officers should:

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

According to the [CPS] the following are currently listed as potential areas of conflicts of interest, but this is an evolving area:

• commercial CAs
• intelligence services
• law and legal functions (prosecution, law enforcement)

Especially security areas are sensitive to these restrictions. For the protection of themselves, and of the community, each Officer is expected to clearly describe any potential conflicts of interest.