User:Kathey

Presenting to Council

Council has been reviewing previous priorities and updating them in a number of the last 4 meetings (now July 2009). Now the funding/long term planning background work we have been working on (Mateo, Renee, Luiz, Tony, Richard and myself) should go to council. Here is a little of the preparation for that presentation:

• Grant Writing Triage: Our first step was to document what should be done when a grant opportunity arises.
• Meta Fund Raising: Our next step was to step back and look at all the factors affecting funding decisions!
• Free Geeks not Free Masons: I took a step back to state my sense of "freedom" in Free Geek.
• 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.
• Talk:General_Priorities: Most recently we have been comparing recent Council brainstorms on Free Geek direction, and previously established priorities documented by the (now retired) Optimization and Priorities group.
• NEXT STEPS? Council is the place for these kinds of big picture questions.

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)