Start Group Report 2011-04

Summary April 2011
Message nos 1997 - 2221
http://freegle.it/start

The Start Working Group discusses principles and procedures for listing new Freegle groups. The Group has 59 members. New members are welcomed.

Administration of Start

A Yahoo poll was carried out and on 6 April 2011 Alison, Burgess Hill was elected as the Start Working Groups Coordinator. The previous Group Owners have resigned as owners. The Freegle Central Mods Team provide a moderator in order to approve new members to the Group.
Requests were made for offers to take on the posts of Deputy Coordinator and Secretary. These positions are still vacant. If anyone is interested in taking up either of these positions, please email Alison, (freegleburgesshill @ gmail.com) and she will be more than happy to explain the roles.
The issue of whether working group members should also be members of Central was raised. This issue is to be taken to Structure for clarification.
The Start task list was discussed and updated

Freecycle Groups moving to Freegle

Details were given to the group on how the Group Affiliation Team (GAT) deal with Freecycle groups wishing to affiliate with Freegle.

Groups with very low message numbers

Discussion took place as a result of statistical analysis of messages on Freegle Groups. This centred around how best to provide support for groups with low message numbers.

It was suggested that help could be initiated centrally by the replacement of the Green Mod School with mentor/buddy support from experienced moderators. The issues of what to do about floundering groups who do not wish to receive assistance, how to motivate moderators to ask for help and how to encourage success were also discussed.

Task 1 - Group Area Guidelines

Discussion on this topic was resumed. This was first started in September 2010. No firm conclusions were reached at that time.

There are two points on which the Group Affiliation Team need to seek clarification:
1. The Group Affiliation Team currently work on groups covering 20,000 to 30,000 but will go up to 120,000 in sparsely populated areas. GAT need to know how they would proceed if they received an application for a population over 500,000 that covered a number of towns and districts.
2. What to do if they had an application to affiliate a group for an area, the name of which is interpreted very differently by different people/sources, e.g. wasn't a town, county or a local government district.
The position currently is that policies have been voted on which state that:
There must not be more than one group per area and It is highly recommended that the area of a group is agreed with Freegle
Discussion is currently continuing on this topic.

Back to Freegle Start or go to next report Start Group Report 2011-05