Development Group Report 2016 05

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Freegle Development report May 2016


Group members 57


Freegle Development is a group where new policies are discussed and voted on and any changes of existing policy are discussed.

May on Development has been quieter than previous months this year. The main topic discussed was volunteer support.

Task 50: volunteer support role

Chris Cant wrote up a first draft of the spec for the volunteer role that we were discussing in April [[1]]

A suggestion was made to change the wording from volunteer manager to volunteer coordinator or volunteer support, which was agreed would be more palatable. It is important that the role is given the correct terminology in order to get the right applicant. After some discussion about the role itself and whether or not DBS checks were necessary a straw poll was set up to see if the idea should be pursued. 66% of Development members were in favour, 28% were against and 7% abstained from the poll.

A second poll was set up to find out if the group agreed to the job description in Chris’s draft. The result of that poll was 67% in favour. 26% against and 7% abstained from the vote.

A recommendation was sent to the Board that the idea should be pursued.

Changing an old rule re setting up replacement groups

A suggestion was made that if a group is lost or disaffiliated we should set up a replacement group. The current ruling is that we do not set up groups to be run centrally.

The last time this was discussed it was decided that we should not use the Freegle Direct lists of disaffiliated groups, without the explicit permission of one volunteer. However it was suggested we could just restart from new after the four weeks grace period and also maybe start new groups in areas with no coverage at all. We would not need to use the FD lists as it was agreed these always belong to the previous owner. Abandoned groups could have a replacement group set up immediately they were declared officially abandoned if this was agreed to. Currently we only start a new group if there is a new application for an area.

This discussion is continuing

Task 40 Best practice review 3:10 Tools used

This section is out of date but as a new platform is being developed, it was decided to leave it for now and a note had been added to the page to say it is under review.

Task 40 : Best practice review 3.11 help

Reviewing where groups can go for help. The list is on the wiki here [Best Practice#Do you know where to turn for help]

The only comment in this so far is that it doesn’t contain a link for the funding group, cafe group or media.

Task 40: Best practice review - preface

It was suggested that the whole of the best practice document on the wiki be prefaced with a statement about the role of volunteers.

  • A- moderate groups
  • B- help members
  • C- publicise group eg do social media, press releases, run stalls, run events
  • D- work with local councils etc

Currently mods mainly do A and B and a bit of C - and that's fine. But widening the role to include C and D would be helpful.

The feeling so far is that these are things we would like mods to do, but not that we can expect them to do and so should just be a recommendation. The discussion continues.

Communicating with volunteers

For a while we have had no reliable way to communicate with volunteers. Edward has implemented a functioning mailer on the new platform to use both the owner address and individual addresses that modtools knows belongs to mods. As well as passively monitoring whether the email is read, it also asks people to clink on a link so we can see how well we are reaching groups. A test message was sent and although results were encouraging there were still a lot of groups not being reached. Development are still discussing the best way to reach those groups and whether the list of non replying groups could be used in some way to achieve that.


If you have any suggestions or ideas for this discussion or any others, please join us on development. The more people’s ideas that can be included in discussions, the better it is for Freegle.

https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/freegleDevelopment/info


Development Team

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