Freegle Discourse Membership

Background

Central Groups (Central and Working Groups) have delegated powers from the Board to conduct certain business for Freegle Ltd. The original intention of national groups was to ensure wide participation of volunteers in discussion and decisions in the national organisation. Although the change from an unincorporated association to an IPS shifted the responsibility for decisions to the Board, the participatory ethos continues by ensuring that central groups maintain a pivotal role in the process of governance of Freegle.

Membership of Freegle Central

It is a mandatory requirement that all communities should have at least one representative on the Freegle Central group. It was decided at the 2016 AGM that this should be actively implemented. This was at first implemented via a manual system of contacting groups. But this has evolved to be a largely automated process.

The process for checking that all groups are represented on Freegle Central is now:

• 1. A nightly automated task on Discourse to check that
  • all users are volunteers, and
  • all groups are represented on Discourse by an active volunteer.
• 2. Reports are sent to the Discourse Support Team if any existing users no longer have moderator/owner status on Modtools and if any groups are no longer represented. Action is then taken to remove users that no longer volunteer and if a group is not represented.
• 3. Note: Modtools has an internal list of all known email addresses that have moderated each community.

National volunteers with support access to ModTools can see who represents each group. The current list of those with support access can be found at Teams

Links

• Freegle UK Central Group
• Discourse Support Team Remit
• Contacting Groups Procedure
• Document Approval Policy (this page is a Guideline)