Freegle Reps Report 2011-06-08

Reps’ Report 13th April to 5th June

Apologies for the delay in this report; we have had illness and other unavailability which have resulted in five of us being away for large portions of this time.

Strategy

• We have a remit to develop a strategy for Freegle, which we discussed when we met as a group in Leeds. We are preparing a document for Freegle outlining a number of different possible strategies and recommending one.
• Progress on this is slow. Our experience highlights the difficulties Freegle faces as a whole – there are tasks which require significant chunks of time from people with specific skills. We have a lot of volunteers who can offer small chunks of time, but there are a small number of volunteers who can provide sustained committed time for tasks which take many hours or days, and these volunteers can therefore become overburdened and risk burn-out.
• Here are two examples of the kinds of tasks which illustrate this:
  • We want to present detailed options with plausible costs (in volunteer time or money) for what’s needed for that option. But researching and estimating those costs is itself very time-consuming.
  • There is a wide range of possible legal structures for Freegle. Our unique virtual democratic structure makes this highly complex, and analysing what is possible is a very sizeable task.
• To keep this moving, we will fairly soon present our overall thinking for discussion on Central, before we go further into some of the detail.

Organisation

• We worked with Working Groups to put in place Coordinators and Deputies to help organise Working Groups more effectively. We look forward to working with them.
• There have been a couple of examples of tasks that need doing, and people who would make a good job of them, but the Reps feel reluctant to ask them formally, because we ought to advertise such tasks openly to all volunteers. The difficulty here is that the process consumes so much time that it’s easier just to let the matter drop and leave the task either undone, or done by existing over-busy volunteers. We would welcome your feedback on this.
• One specific item which has emerged from our strategy discussions is turning the scary and difficult media work into more routine case work along the lines that GAT handles, so that we can get more people involved and more media work done. We will be raising this on Structure.
• We are encouraging the Central mods to get more unrepresented groups on Central.
• We reviewed and agreed a recommendation from Structure about group owners.
• Edward has stepped down from being a Reps’ Observer on GAT; Ollie remains on the GAT group in that role. As a reminder, we have Observers on closed teams: Sian is Observer on the Geeks group, and Jane on Central Mods. Each Working Group also has two Rep Links to make sure we stay in sync: Structure has Edward and Sian, People has Saira and Ollie, Start has Paul and Sian, Media has Adam and Paul, Tech has Ollie and Edward, Local Funding has Kath and Jane.

Miscellaneous

Other stuff:

• We would again like to thank Ray for his work as Returning Officer.
• We discussed a Freegle newsletter to replace FreeSpOut (which has lapsed). We would very much welcome people volunteering to organise this.
• We sent some offlist messages to encourage people to be more active in maintaining the wiki. The wiki is open to all to edit and improve.
• We discussed graphics for new groups, which we will be raising on Start and/or Media.
• As usual, we had some messages forwarded from the info mailbox. It’s encouraging that people contact us and want to work with us – but many of these requests are not things which would benefit Freegle. We are aware that we have yet to formalise a good policy on handling reciprocal links.

Reps’ Matters

We are not making as much progress as we would like on some tasks, and discussed ways to address it.

• Keeping tasks moving requires monitoring of outstanding issues and nagging. This is not an enjoyable role, and we have relied on individuals too much to do this. We have split this up into smaller responsibilities.
• Preparation of this report, which takes about 5 hours, is seen as a chore which people put off doing. We see no alternative though – its production is important for transparency.
• We agreed to circulate wording of non-time-critical internal polls in advance to give people a chance to comment. We have yet to propose this as a formal amendment to the Working Practices.

Edward on behalf of all the Reps

Sian, Saira, Paul, Ollie, Kath, Jane, Edward and Adam

Back to Freegle Representative Group or Freegle Reps Report 2011-04-13, or forwards to Freegle Reps Report 2011-06-28