Development Group Report 2016 09

Development Group Report September 2016

Group members 59

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

The group increased by two new members this month.

We started off with:

Review of election procedures

A long discussion on changes that can be made to the Election process to make it smoother and less work for the ROs

We looked at what procedures should be implemented in the case of an RO not being available at election times. Last year there were some delays when the ROs were not available, and we need to ensure that it doesn’t hold up elections or the AGM again. After much discussion a poll was set up to decide

In the event of loss of communication or any other emergency which causes a Director election to be stalled, the Board can ask:

a. A non-Board Member, or b. A Director who is not standing for election either because they are standing down conpletely or not standing as they are remaining a Director,

to help the process through to completion, with access to the facilities and information and the powers of a Returning Officer.

The Board will run a 2 day long poll on Freegle UK Central for confirmation of their decision.

This poll will run for 4 days and a simple majority will decide.

The poll unanimously agreed to the suggestions. During the poll, the discussion extended into how to access the information that would be needed for elections or polls in the case of an emergency.

It was agreed that the reviewed document should be sent to the Board for adoption and to let them decide the best way for them to be able to access the information.

We also discussed how the election should proceed if we don’t have enough candidates to fill the positions available or if there are just enough. Should we just consider that they are all elected by default? A suggestion was put forward that if there are not more candidates than needed, we should allow Directors to make a statement that new Directors were elected unopposed and would take office.

Task 52 - Abandoned Group Procedure

This poll was the end of a discussion detailed in last months report. It ended in 100% in favour of the revised abandoned groups procedure and a recommendation was made to the board that the new procedures should be adopted. The Board agreed that changes and the new document can now be seen on the wiki

http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Abandoned_Groups_Procedure

Reusing membership lists

After the discussion where it was agreed to allow disaffiliated groups to be recreated, a new discussion began over whether we should be allowed to use the member list of a group where the owner had abandoned the group completely and was not moderating at all.

Everyone agreed that where a group had been abandoned we should be able to reuse the lists, but the Group Owner should be warned if this was being considered.

So it was decided that we should amend the Freegle Direct Information Policy to accommodate transferring membership lists from an abandoned group to a new one in the case of abandonment. New wording was agreed and polled on. The poll was agreed unanimously and a recommendation to adopt the new policy was sent to the board, who have also agreed to it. The updated document can be found at; http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Freegle_Group_Membership_Information_Policy

Membership question

What happens to a membership when a moderator leaves. The question arose of how we would deal with this sort of situation. The general consensus was that if someone was no longer volunteering or moderating a group, that their membership should cease. The money paid is non refundable. It was decided that a new policy was not necessary and that is should be left to the board to implement the rules as they see fit.

Task list Review Website publicity/ Social media tasks

The website and media tasks on the list were sorted into which tasks should be kept and which should be allocated to teams and some were agreed to be abandoned altogether as no longer being relevant. This was done to make sure we only discuss relevant topics.

Development group make changes that affect all Freegle groups. We would love to see more people join us and help with discussions and polls to get a better idea of what you the members really want. If you would like to help in making decisions for the future of Freegle, we would love to see you on Development

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

Development Team

Links

• Development Working Group
• Previous report Development Group Report 2016 08
• Following report Development Group Report 2016 10