Development Group Report 2016 08

Freegle Development August 2016

Group members 57

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

Development kicked off August with a review of the abandoned group procedure.

Task 52 - Abandoned Group Procedure

It has been two years since the abandoned group procedure was last reviewed. Mentors role has changed to offer more support and modtools now provides more information about activity on groups, so it was felt a fresh look at the procedure was necessary.

The biggest change was to allow a group to be recreated if it had been completely abandoned. There were some added side discussions about how a group is declared abandoned and some comparisons of posting figures from 2009 until now.

New wording was polled on and agreed and has now been approved by the Board.

http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Abandoned_Groups_Procedure

Draft Terms of Use

Chris Cant has drafted some terms of use for Freegle members. After a few minor tweeks to the wording, everyone was happy with the new document and the document has been approved by the Board and is already being used on the site. https://ilovefreegle.org/terms

====Review of task list===% The task list was put together from tasks remaining on structure and Freegle growth. We decided it was time to look at the list and re-evaluate which tasks should be abandoned because they were no longer necessary, which could be allocated to other groups within Freegle and which could be dealt with on Development.

The list has been sorted, so we know which of the tasks are still valid for Development to discuss and some tasks are in the hands of other teams within Freegle.

Aftermath of a Group Owners actions and departure

There was a short discussion on how to deal with incidents such as that where the Group Owner of Leeds left Freegle. It was agreed that we couldn’t make rules for cases like this as all would be very different. We already have arbitration in place so new rules were not necessary.

Task 53 Review of Freegle Direc information policy / Transfer of FD members

Freegle has a policy that new groups are never created centrally and that if a group leaves Freegle we will not use the members lists but they will be given to the departing Group Owner to do with as he/she wishes.

In the case of abandoned groups, it was felt that this is not fair to members especially of larger groups, where a lot of people were left with no group at all to use. The earlier review of the abandoned group procedure now allows us to recreate abandoned groups, so we decided to look again at the rule for transferring member lists, in the case of groups that are completely abandoned. The general consensus is that when a group has been abandoned, the member list should be reused on the newly created group. The owner should be informed of the intention. The finer details of this suggestion are still being discussed.

Different levels of moderation

Edward started a discussion regarding the levels of moderators on the new platform. Many moderators agree that the term group Owner is outdated and sounds unfriendly. Edward suggested a single level where all moderators are equal. The general feeling was that although Group Owner isn’t a term that moderators like, it was still felt there needed to be two levels of moderator.

Review Election procedures

A start on a discussion on election procedures and what can be done to guarantee the coming election is run smoothly.

Last year saw serious problems when the ROs were unavailable at the crucial time and the discussion is an attempt to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

The discussion will continue into September.

The Freegle Development Team

Links

• Development Working Group
• Previous report Development Group Report 2016 07
• Following report Development Group Report 2016 09