Financial Optimization Meeting

aka the FinOptMeet

What it was about
On Monday, May 15 2004, concerned FREE GEEK community members (basically, the Council) met at the community room at People's Coop to discuss ways in which FREE GEEK can earn more money or save money on current expenses. A large part of the meeting was a brainstorm, and then we started developing some of the resulting ideas more.

Hopefully, this will develop into projects and proposals to help FREE GEEK become more financially self-supporting.


 * Invitation Document
 * Meeting Minutes

Brainstorm
To begin with, we threw out ideas, both practical and im-: here's the shorthand (slightly edited).

Improve Tours (more frequent tours) -- Miscellaneous Sales (black hole/ebay) -- hit up Build Alumni -- become a United Way Agency -- Sell High End Systems -- Staff Cuts -- Smashtacular -- Membership Program -- reduce Volunteer Discount -- Mass Mailings -- Tech Support for a Fee -- Classes for Cash -- sell Firewalls -- Security in the Store -- Selling Printed Versions of Documentation -- Increase Suggested Donations -- switch Steel Vendor -- Outreach to Moving-related People (property managers, realtors, moving companies) -- More Mandatory Fees -- Credit Card Acceptance/check confirm -- Room Rental -- Outreach to Environmental Press -- Work w/Metro's Curbside Program -- Grantwriting -- seek out more Free Ads -- offer Donation Pickups for a fee -- Hosted Services -- Webhosting -- a more profitable Printer Land -- buy some Paid Ads -- Windows Tech Support -- Linux Classes -- acquire a Case Crusher -- Summer Camp -- acquire a Wire Stripper -- foster Corporate Connections -- hire an Office Coordinator so Oso can be an Outreach Coordinator -- Internet Cafe -- Workspace Rental to Coders -- Print/fax/scan Charge -- Make friends with rich people -- Purchasing Supplies in Bulk with other PAWC organizations -- sell broken electronic bits in the store for Craft Supplies -- Windows to Linux Conversions for small businesses -- hacker assassins for hire -- improving Core Programs -- more booths/Tabling (outreach) -- participate in Related Legislation -- Spaghetti Dinners -- Host Conferences/lectures -- sell more FREE GEEK Schwag -- Targeted Outreach

Impact/Effort Grid
We used a consensus technique called an impact/effort grid to categorize this long list based on how (financially) effective each proposed action would be and how much effort it would take. The idea is that this would help us figure out which items (those in the easy/high impact category, theoretically) we should start working on immediately because it would be folly not to. Going through the list, we also pointed out a coupld of ideas that were patently bad for free geek and eliminated them.

A Few Example Proposals
In the final segment of the meeting, we broke out into smaller groups to work on more detailed considerations of five of the proposals, using a worksheet to make sure we touched on its relation to the FREE GEEK mission, who would be involved, required budget, and timeframe for action.

What Next
Those analyses creted by the working groups should be presented at the next council meeting (Wednesday, Nov 17), and more work should be done on fleshing out other items into workable proposals. This wiki could be an excellent venue for developing these ideas.