Freegle Reps Report 2011-08-15

This Report is a summary of the Reps activities from 29th June 2011 until 15th August 2011. There were approximately 734 posts on the Freegle Reps discussion group between the currently serving Reps.

The report covers 6 weeks due to holidays and other absences that have characterised this period. With these continuing to some extent the intention is to have another six week period for the next report which will cover 16th August through to the end of September.

Principal areas of focus have been as follows:

Bank Account

We have progressed the establishment of a bank account for Freegle. The signatories will be Jane, Edward, Ollie and Sian with Jane named as Treasurer for the purposes of the bank account and Edward named as Chairman for the purposes of the bank account.

The account with Unity Bank will be opened shortly, there are a few detailed queries outstanding with the bank and the necessary forms will be circulated in order to get all the specimen signatures once the bank responds.

Pending the opening of the bank account, individual pledges were received to reimburse certain Reps for necessary expenses ( principally web hosting costs). All the details are in the accounts. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As6_HUGKJ9TOdC1UWGdXd3hOeXVMOVpzR1poTjhjZlE#gid=0

Strategy Document

Following the publication of the Freegle Strategy Document we were pleased that the feedback we received was generally positive but also somewhat disappointed that there was so little. We have now looked seriously at the resources that will be required to achieve the Stabilisation Strategy and have some concerns.

The present structure of Freegle requires 50 - 55 roles to be filled but the existing active volunteer base at a national level does not support this - there are a number of vacancies for national roles and tasks, and a number of roles which have in theory been filled, but where the role holder is not active. The Stabilisation Strategy will require even more resources.

We have therefore been developing a proposal which would streamline the internal organisation of Freegle to fit with the resources available and recognise that individual Reps need to take more of a lead on, and be actively involved in, the various workstreams. At the cut-off date for this report, the roles/workstreams have been identified but the full extent of Reps' availability for each of them is still being worked on. There is some concern that if we cannot put this in place with all the roles filled, the Stabilisation Strategy would be compromised. We hope to have something firm on this in our next report.

Publicity Database

The Reps welcomed and accepted Emma Shane's (Kingston) offer to help with populating the publicity database and to use the skills database to find others to help with the task. Discussions on the structure, content and security of the of the database are ongoing.

Micro Freegle Specialist Group

We received a report from Start recommending that the first "micro freegle" group be approved as a pilot and endorsed their recommendation

ORO Team Documents

We agreed the proposed amendments to the ORO team Roles and Remits and Ending Terms of Office procedure.

Freegle Wiki

We discussed a proposal for an authority to be responsible for the Freegle Wiki but decided that this was not merited since only pre-approved people can edit the Wiki and the history of any changes is trackable.

GAT Membership

We agreed to three individuals being potentially eligible for GAT membership, subject to GAT being satisfied with responses to the test question that the candidates have been set.

Domain Names

Following a marketing message from a domain provider, we reviewed the domain names that Freegle has, and decided that there were no others that we needed at the moment.

AGM

The constitution provides for Freegle to hold an AGM in the next couple of months so we have discussed delegating the organisation of this.

Sian on behalf of all the Reps Cat, Sian, Saira, Paul, Ollie, Kath, Jane, Edward and Adam

Back to Freegle Representative Group or Freegle Reps Report 2011-06-28, or forwards to Freegle Reps Report 2011-09-30