Unused and Redundant National Groups Procedure

Adopted by the Board at their meeting of 29th April 2015.

This procedure does not apply to dormant or abandoned local Freegle reuse groups.

Yahoo or Google groups set up in the name of Freegle nationally (for Teams, Working Groups etc) which end up unused or made redundant should have ownership passed to volunteer-support@ilovefreegle.org and board@ilovefreegle.org addresses. The members of the group will be consulted either before change of ownership or, if this is not practical, after to ensure that there is general agreement to close it. The group will be set to full moderation to effectively 'close' the group without deleting the archive of information. Access to the archives will be available to the members of the group, and to Freegle Volunteers by request to the owner address. The home page of the group will be changed to reflect its status and a pointer to a replacement group given if that is applicable.

Groups set up specifically to deal with appeals or personal information will be kept by the owner for a period of not less than 6 months after the last message is posted relating to the appeal or sensitive situation. The group members should preferably set a minimum time limit for keeping the group open as part of their work. The group can then be deleted, after notifying the Board at least 7 days before doing so.

All groups that have been archived or deleted will be listed on the Freegle wiki.

Groups archived/deleted:

• Freegle Growth - remit moved to Development Working Group
• Freegle Start - remit moved to Growth Working Group
• Freegle Structure - remit moved to Development Working Group
• Freegle People - remit moved to Growth Working Group
• Freegle Media- remit moved to Development Working Group
• Freegle Legal - group closed.
• Home Page Help - group closed.
• Freegle Mobile Team - team closed.
• Documents Team, set up to support Google Document Manager
• Ombudsman and Returning Officer Team group - ORO Team Roles and Remits
• https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleCentralAndCafeMods/ This group was set up as an admin group with a Central Members database for the moderators of Central UK, Rock Cafe and Working groups so we could synchronize approving members of Central and Working groups.
• https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/iafcc/ Group was set up in the latter stages of many group's affiliation to Freecycle and then the start up of Freegle as a closed group for the elected reps of the IAFCMods Group below.
• https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/IAFCMods/info Group was set up in the latter stages of many group's affiliation to Freecycle and then the start up of Freegle. Open to any reuse volunteers
• https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FredUK/ Group set up to discuss a moderators handbook for Freegle; resulted in this wiki and the group became redundant.
• https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/freegle-forwards The group used by those leaving Freecycle and making the new Freegle network.
• Safeguarding Group -discussion forum for drawing up safeguarding guidelines for Freegle https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Freegle-Safeguarding/info
• Pet Mods Group - https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Freegle_petmods - group made redundant in January 2018 as part of a wider wiki review.
• Proofreaders - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Freegle-Proofreading/ - group unused for a few years, so made redundant in APril 2018 as part of wider wiki review.

National Groups established on Yahoo:

Yahoo announced they were starting to effectively close Yahoo Groups from October 2019. All working national groups were quickly moved over to Discourse (www.discourse.ilovefreegle.org):

• Central
• Development
• Tech
• Funding
• Cafe

Links:

• Document Approval Policy
• Previous Freegle UK document Unused and Redundant National Groups