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Home / News / Blog
The Change in My Role at Conservancy
byBradley M. Kühn
on March 31, 2014
Today, Conservancy
announced the addition of Karen Sandler to our management team. This
addition to Conservancy's staff will greatly improve Conservancy's
ability to help Conservancy's many member projects.
This outcome is one I've been working towards for a long time. I've
focused for at least a year on
fundraising for
Conservancy in hopes that we could hire a third full-time staffer.
For the last few years, I've been doing basically two full-time jobs,
since I've needed to give my personal attention to virtually everything
Conservancy does. This obviously doesn't scale, so my focus has been on
increasing capacity at Conservancy to serve more projects better.
I (and the entire Board of Directors of Conservancy) have often worried if
I were to disappear, leave Conservancy (or otherwise just drop dead),
Conservancy might not survive without me. Such heavy reliance on one
person is a bug, not a feature, in an organization. That's why I worked so
hard to recruit Karen Sandler as Conservancy's new Executive Director.
Admittedly, she helped create Conservancy and has been involved since its
inception. But, having her full-time on staff is a great step forward:
there's no single point of failure anymore.
It's somewhat difficult for me to relinquish some of my personal control
over Conservancy. I have been mostly responsible for building Conservancy
from a small unstaffed “thin” fiscal sponsor into a
“full-service” fiscal sponsor that provides virtually any work
that a Free Software project requests. Much of that has been thanks to my
work, and it's tough to let someone else take that over.
However, handing off the Executive Director position to Karen specifically
made this transition easy. Put simply, I trust Karen, and I recruited her
personally to take over (one of) my job(s). She really believes in
software freedom in the way that I do, and she's taught me at
least half the things I know about non-profit organizational management.
We've collaborated on so many projects and have been friends and colleagues
— through both rough and easy times — for nearly a decade.
While I think I'm justified in saying I did a pretty good job as
Conservancy's Executive Director, Karen will do an even better job than I
did.
I'm not stepping aside completely from Conservancy management, though.
I'm continuing in the role of President and I remain on the Board of
Directors. I'll be involved with all strategic decisions for the
organization, and I'll be the primary manager for a few of Conservancy's
program activities: including at least
the non-profit accounting
project
and Conservancy's
license enforcement activities. My primary staff role, however, will
now be under the title “Distinguished Technologist” — a
title we borrowed from HP. The basic idea behind this job at
Conservancy is that my day-to-day work helps the organization understand
the technology of Free Software and how it relates to Conservancy's work.
As an initial matter, I suspect that my focus for the next few years is
going to be the
non-profit accounting
project, since that's the most urgent place where Free Software is
inadequately providing technological solutions for Conservancy's work.
(Now, more than ever, I urge you
to donate to that
campaign, since it will become a major component of funding my
day-to-day work. :)
I'm somewhat surprised that, even in the six hours since this
announcement, I've already received emails from Conservancy member project
representatives worded as if they expect they won't hear from me anymore.
While, indeed, I'll cease to be the front-line contact person for issues
related to Conservancy's work, Conservancy and its operations will remain
my focus. Karen and I plan a collaborative management style for the
organization, so I suspect for many things, Karen will brief me about
what's going on and will seek my input. That said, I'm looking forward to
a time very soon when most Conservancy management decisions won't primarily
be mine anymore. I'm grateful for Karen, as I know that the two of us
running Conservancy together will make a great working environment for both
of us, and I really believe that she and I as a management team are greater than the
sum of our parts.
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