Funding-group

Presenting to Council
The Funding Group (Mateo, Renee, Luiz, Tony, Richard and myself) is ready to present its background work to Community Council for direction on next steps. --ks 22:40, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Recent history of Funding Group activities
The Free Geek Funding Group was born in March 2009, as a spin-off from Public Relations (PR). The Free Geek Funding Group has been meeting weekly, every Thursday morning at 10 AM, since April 2nd and working for roughly 4 to 6 hours Thursdays, in our out of the building. Meetings have been for reports about previous work, and discussion with staff about current Free Geek operations affecting Funding. Most of the working-time is spent on reviewing existing documents (between meetings), updating links and writing overviews of Funding related processes.


 * (April 2009) Grant Writing Triage & Category: Grantwriting: Our first step was to document what should be done when a grant opportunity arises.
 * (May 2009) Meta Fund Raising: Our next step was to step back and look at all the factors affecting funding decisions. And there are lots. Our board member, Marie helped with this, by presenting twice on this topic, once for Funding Group, and once for an open staff meeting. Thanks Marie!
 * (June) Free Geeks not Freemasons: I took a perspective "step back" to state something about "freedom" in Free Geek.
 * (June-July 2009) Category:Long Term Planning: From June 3rd to July 2nd 2009 I read and studied connections between wiki pages, creating links between grants, funding, big picture, long term planning, strategic planning, space use, and other topic documents.
 * (July) General_Priorities & Talk:General_Priorities: Most recently we have been comparing (A) recent Council brainstorms on Free Geek direction, and (B) previously established priorities documented by the (now retired) Optimization and Priorities group. Renee did the line by line comparisons and documented the differences in tables on these pages. Yeay Renee! We also started our first interviews with Free Geek program area folk. The store was the first area we interviewed. We (I) asked Luiz: Which of these (five?) wiki pages about store plans and priorities are the most up to date? Which ones have good formats and ideas, even if they need updating? How can we help you update these planning documents? (The Funding Group could use help in fulfilling the task-list generated by those meetings.)

Next steps for Funding Group, and help needed from Community Council
Funding Group needs to know the answer when potentially large donors ask: "What direction is Free Geek going, and how does it plan on getting there?"

Council is the place for these kinds of big picture questions about Free Geek direction. So Funding has found itself joining the stream of the ongoing Council discussions on the general direction of Free Geek. So what are the questions we are taking to Council? There are a bunch of large questions to address, but:

the ultimate goal is to better prepare funding folk, to answer this question from potentially large donors: "How can I help?"

We already know how to answer the question about how to help, from most people:
 * For donating hardware: http://www.freegeek.org/donate
 * For contributing financially: http://www.freegeek.org/donate/philanthropy/
 * For giving time and expertise: http://www.freegeek.org/volunteer

But big donors want grant applications, so they can get answers to the big questions about where Free Geek is going, what it will accomplish, where its coming from, and its likelihood of success.

Background on the Free Geek Council
Renee and Kathey combined the Longterm Planning General Priorities and Council Priorities and created a condensed list of the priorities that are on Free Geek's and Council's radar. It is up to Council to choose the top priorities for consideration.

General information about the Free Geek Community Council role can be found here:


 * Council Orientation
 * Community Council: The place to find meeting minutes
 * Founding Document of the Council

Long Term Planning
A season of fundraising meetings have evolved into an effort to get Long Term Planning visions up to date. The fundraising group is currently reviewing wiki documents and interviewing Free Geek project coordinators. When all of Free Geek can speak with coherence on its long term plans, fundraising efforts can focus on rallying support from donors and others, on that set of plans.

--ks 20:22, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Fundraising focus
Hi, I wrote this text below about governance, then moved out of state for a one year job. I'm back and learning more about Free Geek:, Category:Fundraising, and Category:Long Term Planning. I may be able to describe Free Geek's unique structure better than most, and fundraising seems like the most useful place to put that type of attention right now.

--kathey 11 June 2009 (PDT)

Governance Documentation Review
Free Geek is an extraordinary example of workplace democracy. This governance documentation review project supports democracy by making the Free Geek governance structure more transparent. If democracy is governance by the people, then the people need to know where their own power is, eh? Maybe one good outcome of the review would be a pretty power chart with "you are here" signs all over it. We'll see how it develops.

For now, the first step is to review our existing documentation of decision making processes and power relations inside Free Geek and then between Free Geek projects across the country. The next step is to compare the documents with current understandings of how things work and how they should work.

The council has expressed enthusiastic support for this project and I'd love to hear from volunteers interested in contributing to it.

More later, --kathey 16:26, 27 July 2007 (PDT)