Freegle Board Minutes April 2016

Meeting of Directors of Freegle Limited held on 13th April 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.

NEW MEMBERS

None

CURRENT BOARD

Andrew Ludlow, Andrew Trusty, Cat Fletcher, Christian B, Edward Hibbert, Ollie Clark BOARD VACANCIES There are currently 2 vacancies. The Board would welcome applications from interested Members.

board@ilovefreegle.org

It was agreed that the Director remit should be re-written as a blog post which would then be advertised via social media.

http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Director_Role_Description

Action: Cat

DIRECTORS PRESENT

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

APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE

John

Chairman Edward

Minutes Alison via text transcript

DECLARATIONS OF INTEREST

This is now here

RISK REGISTER

Unchanged. After consideration, the Board has awarded the paid social media work to Cat, but the risk of losing key individuals remains high. See

https://docs.google.com/a/ehibbert.org.uk/spreadsheets/d/1RQ3Uzgt7Lf_RTRRH8vdySOYXzqnHI-JxG1SVBeykctI/edit#gid=0

MATTERS ARISING

Cat and Edward met Nimber. It was a useful meeting, but practical integration is stalled pending new platform work. The response from Central to a delivery option was not enthusiastic.
New Business cards ordered and when Sally has received them we discuss any issues.
There was discussion about obtaining a patron and efforts are ongoing.
Ollie is liaising with regard to Returning Officers.
Edward sent business plan to Paul Varags; no comments received.
Edward to collect Board biographies for Chris. No action as little benefit adding to old site.
Loans - Edward has received advice and this topic has been dealt with on Development.

REPORTS

Platform (John)

All seems to be progressing well.

Action : John needs to update Central on progress, spend planned milestones and timescales, add/update a risk around platform support, and look to a realistic plan to mitigate or have alternatives.

The Board agreed that the risk of losing access to Yahoo Groups has increased.

The issues surrounding Facebook integration were discussed. No problems are anticipated with Trash Nothing and the Freegle mobile app. Andrew Widgery, Snaply, has not replied to emails from us about this.

The risk register needs to be updated accordingly.

Action: John

Finance (John)

Accounts in a very healthy space.

Current Balance £48,547; Microsoft money £35k and Freegle UK £5k bank transfer happened.

Account summary to follow.

Unity bank has started to charge for banking services.
GAYL:

Switching to a different card model. We need to investigate and decide whether to promote.

PayPal Giving Fund is changing - Edward has a letter from them saying what we need to do.
Chris has won a grant from the Cumbria Waste Prevention Fund, of £1135, to run give and takes, write a blog, do G4G-type collation, and write a report. This will need a £175 top-up from Freegle. Chris is talking to Cat about the best way to do the blog.

The Board unanimously agreed to pay £175 to Chris.

Action: John

Tudor Trust application was rejected with no useful feedback; we cannot reapply for 12 months.

The Board expressed their gratitude to Chris for his hard work on the application.

Cat asked whether it would be possible to have a float available for advance payments.

It was agreed to discuss on the Yahoo Group and involve Jane, Treasurer.

Action: John to lead discussion on how advance payments could be made

Get a Credit/debit card (Edward doubts Paypal would do - some people don’t take it, probably because of fees) option for small purchases/renewals.
Finalise and shut down Freegle UK account - just a couple of direct payers still to sort
Re-consider the choice of bank account given Unity fees. There are plenty of free accounts but it means moving stuff again, which takes time.
Look at a savings account to gain more interest whilst we have a good chunk of cash. Best ones lock the cash up for longer but can get nearly 2%

Board Secretary (Edward)

Edward is doing agendas; Alison is doing minutes.

Company Secretary (AndyL)

There are 115 Members with 0 new members this month.

Volunteer Support (Edward)

We are not able to find a volunteer to lead on this task. The Board discussed whether to use some of the Microsoft funding to pay an experienced person to advise and help with volunteer support. They will discuss further on the Yahoo group. Edward will contact Jacky.

'Action: All, Edward to contact Jacky

CTO (Edward)

Hosting:

Servers stable and hosting FD + ModTools + platform development. Backups going to Google storage; the free trial is over, and we have a bill (for $26) which I will need to reclaim. . Bytemark have given us an extra 1TB of disk space, which we may use for data archiving and image hosting. We are putting a backup there as well as Google, for quicker recovery.

ModTools:

New version is now live.

FD:

Work on user side is under way - see separate updates.

Website development is in hand and awaiting further platform development.

Need to recontact Olio when platform is at a suitable point.

Yahoo:

No movement on the issue of Yahoo losing some messages. Edward’s contact didn’t reply to some recent issues.

Trash Nothing

Andrew T reported that work is underway for an update to the native app. The Yahoo mail backlog issues seem to have resolved themselves.

Media (Cat)

Cat is continuing to liaise with Rory Stewart about possible Waste House event and what help the DEFRA team can give us.
FRN CO2

Cat continues to pursue contact about this and another measurement tool. She could go to the FRN conference on 26th (the only proper REUSE conf in UK). Would cost £400 (accomm, travel, conf. fee (£215). Cat thinks it would be good to go to sort out access to FRN The Board will discuss this further on the Yahoo Group.

Friday Ad

Cat will check with Edward about tech progress

Brighton City Reuse Depot

Cat is just waiting for CCTV to be installed at new site.

Health and Safety (Ollie)

Nothing to report.

Development (from Jacky)

Since last report of 11th April 2015:

1. The main discussion has been a remit for a Volunteer Coordinator and we also held a straw poll on whether the idea to employ someone in this type of role was a good idea or not. The results and recommended remit were posted to the Board on 14th May. This task generated a lot of interesting discussion and also the largest participation in votes for a long time. The discussion on the value of specialist groups was concluded with GAT kindly taking on the task of contacting present groups to see if they wish to continue or not.

2. A new conversation has arisen about T&C for the new platform which is resulting in two strands - T&C for members of groups and T&C for groups as part of Freegle. Chris has offered to work on this if others wish to join him. So far no-one has offered!

3. Contacting groups: Edward has introduced a new way to bulk mail groups, which sends a message to all Yahoo owner addresses as well as personal email addresses known by Modtools to be used by volunteers groups when moderating. Development are now discussing whether the information on which groups have not acknowledged receipt of central mailings should be used as a basis for extra contact to find out if there is a need for support.

4. Best Practice review continues.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

It was agreed that GAT should be asked to contact Specialist groups and unless a positive interest can be found to keep it going these are closed

DATE OF NEXT MEETING

25 May 2016

CONSENT AGENDA

It was unanimously agreed:

We agree to pay Cat for the Social Media services as outlined in the Expression of Interest document at £120 per week, invoiced in advance. This will be further subject to final contract for additional agreement.
We agree to pay E Hibbert the sum of £ 122.39 for the Renewal receipt for order #953758146

https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleBoard/conversations/topics/5284

Freegle will pay £23.50 in advance to Cat for train fare to attend London meetings on 9th March as per

https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleBoard/conversations/messages/5190

We agree the change to the Mentors Remit as shown in

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ll_jrtTvRbcQeI0J7Tw2Qmr6bnsH2edf44S-oBVQWfs/edit?usp=sharing

The board agrees that the bulk of the remaining Freegle UK account money (£5,000) is transferred to the Freegle Ltd bank account.
We approve the Tudor Trust application prepared by Chris Cant.
We approve the Board minutes at

http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Freegle_Board_Minutes_January_2016

We should add the 2 amendments proposed by Development

(https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleBoard/conversations/topics/5011)

We should refund £6.45 to Jane for postage of the Microsoft cheque
Freegle should pay Edward's train fare for Resource London event on 26th January 2015. £91.10.

The Board authorises payment £1583.33 to Edward for IT project see

https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleBoard/conversations/messages/4962