Basic Requirements of a Freegle Group
Mandatory Requirements
The mandatory affiliation requirements for the Freegle organisation in relation to local groups, were decided in a poll in January 2010:
- All items offered or requested have to be free.
- Selling items is not allowed.
- All items offered or requested have to be legal.
- All groups are non-profit.
This means that all of the requirements above are our basic shared values, and must be followed by all groups listed on the Freegle website.
Non-mandatory Recommendations
The guidelines below are 'highly recommended' by Freegle, but not mandatory because they didn't receive a high enough majority in the poll. This means that you don't have to follow them, but you're strongly encouraged to do so.
- Not to allow swapping of items
- Not to allow messages asking to borrow items
- To include the Freegle logo on the group homepage
- To include a link to the Freegle website on the group homepage
- To operate in a geographic area that is agreed with Freegle
- To have at least one moderator per group should be a member of Freegle Central (on minimum of Special Notices) .
Whether posts/items should be suitable for all ages is currently being revisited by the Structure working group and the Reps. This will be repolled at a later date with a view to having a workable guideline in place soon (or not as the case may be).
Pretty well everything else is up to you and your members to decide. We should always remember that our groups are run for the benefit of the members - you will never please everyone, but a majority is good! Think seriously before you impose local restrictions - one dilemma with restrictions is that if there are too many members will not remember them and it causes bad feeling to keep rejecting posts.
