Freegle Board Minutes June 2016

Minutes of a Meeting of Directors of Freegle Limited held on 29 June 2016 at 8pm by Skype Chat

MEMBERSHIP OF FREEGLE LTD

All Freegle Volunteers are entitled to be Members of Freegle Ltd Registered in England as an Industrial and Provident Society for the Benefit of the Community. http://freegle.it/JoinFreegleLtd

NEW MEMBERS

There are no new Members.

CURRENT BOARD

Andrew Ludlow, Trusty, Cat Fletcher, Christian Brenninkmeijer, Edward Hibbert, Ollie Clark

BOARD VACANCIES

There are currently 2 vacancies. The Board would welcome applications from interested Members. board@ilovefreegle.org

We have publicised the role description for Director vacancies, but with no responses yet.

It was agreed that the vacancies would be advertised in the next edition of the e-newsletter which is due on 15 July.

DIRECTORS PRESENT

Andrew Ludlow, Andrew Trusty, Cat Fletcher,, Edward Hibbert, Ollie Clark, John Carroll

APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE

Christian.

Chairman: Edward

Minutes: Alison via text transcript

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

This is now

here

RISK REGISTER

See

here

MATTERS ARISING

Business Cards

Action on Edward to automate request for cards via ModTools. Edward confirmed that he intends to do this when possible. He reported that prompts on ModTools for moderators to take action seem to work well.

Patrons

The Board continue to consider this.

Returning Officers

The Board agreed unanimously that they would advise Andy, Company Secretary, that they would like Ray Owen and Alison Redway to be appointed as Returning Officers.

Business plan

The Board is not actively using this document. The current focus is on the volunteer support role, but we should return to it.

FreeStock

One request has been received for financial support and acted on.

REPORTS

Platform (John)

Not progressed much on the platform apart from starting to look at the support risk mitigation.

Edward is cracking on with development, with many new features in Alpha testing.

Outstanding Action - mechanism for feedback / guidance for the development from the board/users

Outstanding action - Need to speak with Chris to work out the best way to align the Mobile app with the new platform as paid for work

It was agreed that the new platform needs to work well on mobile devices. The Board are considering buying an IPhone 5 for testing purposes. Edward will also consider other means of testing.

Action: Edward

Edward will discuss graphic design for the new site with Cat.

Action: Edward/Cat

Finance (John)

We need to re-register with PayPal for their charity donation service (which is currently promoted on FD and raises significant funds). Stop-press PayPal have broken this, so we’ve switched the FD donation appeal to Virgin until it’s resolved, which will cause a drop-off in donations.

Freegle Ltd Total Income: 44,536.14 Total Expenditure: (18,280.30)

Reserves carried forward (keep min of £1,000, poll 35049) 47,109.92 Share capital - 117.00 Total Share Capital and Reserves 47,226.92

Represented by:

Bank 47,226.92

Freegle UK Bank account has £194.12 balance, with 2 individual donors still paying in £11 per month. No expenditure is taken from this account and we will transfer the balance when the 2 have moved to VMG. One who pays in £10 per month says he won't use VMG due to his principled stand on fees. Jane has kindly volunteered to reclaim his gift aid manually.

Finance Jobs ( On Trello)

a. Close the Freegle UK bank account – there are still 2 individuals who have standing orders (Total £11 p.m.)have chased again, may need to abandon the £1 donation

b. Amend Finance Rules and get debit cards – Rule change voted on, have asked Jacky to amend rules on the Wiki, will restart the application with Jane. - outstanding

c. Finalise contract for Social Media services – Not progressed

d. Re-assess the Current account banking since Unity introduced charges : - have spoken with Jacky to do some research but I need to write up key criteria - outstanding

e. Look at a savings account - have selected candidate accounts, awaiting input from Jane. Will set up a vot and get £35k moved over soon.

Board Secretary (Edward)

Edward is doing agendas; Alison is doing minutes.

Company Secretary (AndyL)

There are 0 new members this month It was noted during the meeting that legislative changes to the IPS may need to be documented on the Wiki.

Action: ?

Volunteer Support (Edward)

Our advertisement on Third Sector runs until 13th July.
We have had 426 views, 2 applications, and 2 phone call from which we applications.
We will wait until the advertisement ends and review our position.

The Board are considering the decision making process for the appointment.

Action: All

Partnerships (Edward)

Nextdoor

We had a good response from Freegle volunteers setting up groups; some decided not to pursue it.
Ray in Minster Thanet is the runaway leader.
If we get a good response from Freegle, then this would help in establishing a relationship.

Action on Edward to encourage this further

The following are stalled pending new platform work.

Nimber. Useful meeting. The response from Central to a delivery option was not enthusiastic.
Friday Ad. We’d discussed cross-publishing.
Olio. Some promising contacts, but they’re probably fine doing their own thing.

CTO (Edward)

Hosting:

Stable. We got some more disk space for free from ? (despite offering to pay).

ModTools:

More stable over the last month, as it should be.

FD v3 aka new platform aka Iznik:

Mailings moved over from FD v1-2 to FD v3. A few teething problems but fairly smooth.
Close to having a beta to put out on Tech - within the next fortnight.
We had discussed how to mitigate the risk of potential issues by reviewing the membership of the Alpha group. The window is closing on actually doing this. Action on John.

FD v1-2:

Not much to say - fixed a bug in search.

Yahoo:

Stable over the last month.

Trash Nothing:

There is some integration to do with the new platform further down the line.

MEDIA (Cat)

Cat is continuing to liaise with Rory Stewart about possible Waste House event and what help the DEFRA team can give us. She has not yet been able to organise an event with Rory Stewart.

Action: Respond to email from DEFRA about priority setting.

Brighton City Reuse Depot

The shipping containers have been entrapped on a piece of land since January but Cat has been given permission to move to a new site in July. Cat has been shortlisted for investment and business mentoring in Royal Bank of Scotland Innovation Gateway programme. She pitches to Buyers on July 7th at Lancaster UniOpportunities to trial your innovation on the estates of RBS, Sainsbury's, Carillion and BaxterStorey. Four leading UK companies, RBS, BaxterStorey, Carillion and Sainsbury's, are looking for innovations focussed on reducing energy, water and waste and enhancing engagement across their property estates.

http://www.rbs.com/news/2016/april/rbs-supports-growth-of-innovation-gateway.html http://innovationgateway.rbs.com/

If successful this would be for capital investment (up to £100k) for a warehouse and to develop systems to prevent waste in ‘office’ environments that can be replicated///basically just boosting and bettering what Cat already does in Brighton to prevent waste for council, unis, builders etc

Facebook

The most successful post ever, 2 weeks ago, reached over 200K people. The Board discussed how a new Volunteer Manager might be able to work with Cat to improve support to Groups for local promotion.

Action: Cat to write out proposals/Post on Central about Facebook. Microsoft

Cat continues to liaise with them over how we have spent the money they donated to us.

Action: Cat

Health and Safety (Ollie)

Nothing to report.

Development (from Jacky)

Since last report of 23rd May 2016

1. Best Practice review is complete except for a review of the preface. This has expanded to a proposal to add an extra page setting out the agreed commitment of group volunteers and Freegle as that isn't summarised anywhere at present. Information sent out from GAT to new volunteers have been used to inform the draft in progress.
2. Edward posted informing the group that auto emails will be sent to Mentors for groups not moderating regularly via FDv2 or at all on a machine with the plugin installed, so that can be followed up if required in the context of other information Mentors have. Mentors are also informed which groups are not using Modtools. This information generated only one small positive response.
3. Chris has agreed to lead the task to put together t&cs for the new platform, which would just require a click/tick agreement from new members to cut down on obstacles in the way of joining.
4. Overall, conversation on Development is slow with decreasing numbers of people participating.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

GAT

They are working with most specialty groups to either close or merge into the main group in that area. So far no specialty group has been found that expect Edward to take them into consideration for platform development.

Reports

The Board agreed that they would ask Teams if they would be able to provide them with a monthly report.