Meta Question

How big should Free Geek get?

Over the years, we've mostly done stuff because we had to, reacting to emergency situations as they came up and forming our policy out of necessity. We think it's time to think ahead and starting deciding where we want to go.

Free Geek has evolved through several stages. Each stage operated in its own way, but failed to work well at a certain point due to an increase in the size of the organization. Each new stage grew out this growth.

From a staff perspective, we could identify several stages:

One staff person

We didn't know if we were a viable organization and were trying to see if we could could become somewhat viable before our seed money ran out.

Informal collective

Three members that didn't have any staff meetings and decided things by word of mouth

Regular Collective

Five to ten people that met on a weekly basis

Larger collective

We had a dozen or so people. Staff meetings devolved into a laundary list of issues that got delegated to ad hoc committees. At the beginning of this phase those committees often didn't have the time to schedule a meeting. A designated person started putting these meetings onto the schedule.

A larger, more decentralized collective

We still meet regularly as a whole staff, but also has several standing committees, reducing the need for the overhead involved with setting up an ad hoc committee.