Development Group Report 2015 08
Freegle Development Working Group Report
August 2015
The development group has grown a little this month with membership now standing at 41 members, up 6 members from the end June report. There wasn't a great deal to report in July, so it was decided to combine the July report with the August one.
Members: 41
Task 1 - Identifying groups that need help
Finishing off this task on Development. Christian ran a test to see if automated 'reject me' emails would give us a better idea of which groups are struggling. The result was that this first test did not work because of Yahoo limitations on joining groups and also because one group owner was unhappy about the whole idea. Edward has suggested we continue with this idea but try running the the test a different way. We will continue to attempt to identify struggling groups.
This task is now complete.
Task 22: Internal News
A group is being set up to create a news report similar to the old Freespout. If you think you can help with this please contact Jacky on Mod-News-owner@yahoogroups.com
Task 32: Tendering guidance
This task is to deal with putting work out to tender. There needed to be a limit set after which we would put any work out to tender. After much discussion and a poll, the Development team recommended that the wording/procedure below was adopted and added to the Finance Procedures.
Tendering:
The Board will publish on Central each year the annual objectives with associated budgets, including where any funding is available or planned to be raised. All paid work will be open to expressions of interest from any volunteer for delivering any of the objectives or wishing to be involved in raising required funding. Paying People in Freegle Guidelines refers. If and when budgets or priorities change, the Board will publish those amendments in advance of contracting paid work.
If a piece of work or service required exceeds payment of £10k, the Board will seek at least 2 quotes from interested parties, and if in excess of £20k will seek at least 3 quotes, including from external parties if practicable. The Board will decide on the best person or company to deliver the work based on which is in the best interests of Freegle. A contract will be set up for all paid work over £100 (Contract for Services) and Directors will follow agreed procedures when discussing and deciding on paid work (Conflicts of Interest Procedure).
Updating Freegle 'About' page
It was decided that the 'About' page for the ilovefreegle.org website needed updating. It was time to lose the references to our Freecycle days and the big split and use the page to promote ourselves as a standalone organisation. The about page has now been amended with agreed wording http://www.ilovefreegle.org/about/
Task 35 : Common rules for caretaker groups
This task was for the Mentor team, who are finding themselves needing to care for more and more groups that have been handed over by their owners, for Freegle volunteers to run centrally while they attempt to find new moderators and owners. It was felt that all Caretaker groups should be governed by the same rules which would be as basic as possible, so that when new owners are found to take groups on, they would have a fresh group with basic rules that they could work and build on themselves. In addition, all caretaker groups should have their own modsgroup to copy rejection messages to. This would give new Group Owners a history of emails. They should also use identical configurations in modtools , with some discretion as sometimes one size doesn't fit all.
Polls have agreed the suggestion initially. The rules are being decided by the mentor team, who will bring them to Development to discuss further and maybe improve before deciding whether to actually approve them. Development have informed the Mentor team of this decision.
Name and group first
A suggestion was put forward by Dominic that moderators should put their name and group first , so it is at the top of emails sent to central and working groups. Generally because of people using auto signatures and really just remembering, it was decided to try the idea out on Development for now to see if it would work and people would in fact remember to add name and group first.
Task 16: Local Press Releases
We discussed local press releases and adapting generic press releases to help new mods. It was suggested that we need several different press releases for all mods to use. Some that are editable would be ideal so they could be adapted for any group to use. Cat suggested we need to ask all mods to make a list of local press contacts for their own groups. A suggestion was made that it would be good to have a monthly sample press release although we would need the volunteer resources to do that.
If you want to join in our discussions please join Development group at https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreegleDevelopment/info
Development Working Group Team
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