The New Meta Question

In January of 2005 the Free Geek community was four+ years into existence, and we authored two wiki pages dealing with "big picture" issues we'd need to confront. The Meta Question (How big should Free Geek get? How should Free Geek get big? Should Free Geek get big?) asked us to consider the impact of growth on our organization. Speculations on the Future of Free Geek described several other external forces that would shape the organization.

Four+ years later, it's time to take another look, re-evaluate those trends and forces given our current experiences, and make our best estimates as to how this affects our organization.

I believe that this exercise leads to an important pair of questions for consideration:

How long will Free Geek be relevant?

That could be restated "how long will Free Geek be around?" since if we become no longer relevant our purpose, mission, and volunteer base would evaporate and our organization would disappear. This consideration gives rise to a second, related question ...

How will Free Geek be relevant for long?

That is, by understanding the forces that are beyond our control but that affect us, how can we use that knowledge to adapt to the new reality and extend the life of the organization. Of course, there will be ways to do this that change the organization so much that is is no longer recognizable as Free Geek. But there may be ways to adapt that carry the mission and principles of the organization forward and are worth pursuing.

Unless we consider both questions together we can't really adequately address either.

RfS 14:13, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Updating the Meta Question

In the Meta Question document we looked at Free Geek in terms of its programs -- Adoption, Build, Coding, Education, Recycling, Sales. Of those programs Coding has changed rather dramatically, but the rest are still intact and still describe the majority of what Free Geek does (assuming you expand Build to include all the pre and post build activities we now do). Here's a new section

Many categories of staff with a collective

There are about 30 staff members (but it's hard to keep track). This includes 13 collective members, 4 nonprofit apprentices (formerly paid interns), 8 committed non-collective members, and several people that fall outside that category. The staff collective meets weekly (currently) or bi-weekly, and there are several standing committees, work groups, and the like. We're re-examining this structure as most of the non-collective categories and the increased size in staff have stressed our ability to work in as democratic of a fashion as we used to.

• Adoption -- the essential pieces of this program remain intact, but it has grown much larger and more organized.
• Build --
• Coding --
• Education --
• Recycling --
• Sales --

Yo! New programs:

• Hardware Grants -- this existed in 2005, but was small enough to merit exclusion from the list of programs. Now we give away (more ? as many ?) computers to nonprofits as we do to adoption and build volunteers combined.
• Nonprofit Apprenticeships -- while we had paid "interns" in 2005, we now have a small collective of temporary workers designed to teach a team of (typically young) people how to manage an area (receiving) in a nonprofit, how to meet and decide things, how to manage volunteers, and how to work with other departments. NPAs even participate in hiring their replacement when their nine month tour of duty is up.
• Volunteer Internships --