Receiving Internship Proposal Clarity Page

The Proposal

Hire a temporary (6 or 9-month) job experience Receiving Intern. The Intern would work 23 or 24 hours a week, 20 hours in receiving and 3 or 4 in meetings and doing administrative tasks (i.e., reading email and updating Basic Receiving documentation). The Intern would need to be very good at working with people, and enjoy organizing, but would not need a technical background. Staff members would take over the technically-oriented tasks of Advanced Receiving.

Rationale

Currently, we have an Exploratory Intern whose responsibilities originally included:

• Oversight and coordination of the Basic Receiving area
• Restructuring and reorganization of the Advanced Receiving area
• Culling and preparation of items for sale through Ebay and the Thrift Store
• Document new procedures created

(While these specific duties aren't necessarily listed in the Reuse Exploratory Internship job description at http://wiki.freegeek.org/index.php/Reuse_Exploratory_Intern all of these tasks are included in the broader job responsibilities listed there.)

It's become apparent that this job description creates too much work for one job position to handle, and more attention is needed in the Basic Receiving area than previously assumed. For this reason, we created a Receiving Committee of existing collective members to fulfill the Advanced Receiving-type functions of the Reuse Exploratory Internship, and created a much simpler Basic Receiving oversight position to be filled by a temporary, job experience intern.

We modeled the Receiving Committee after the Recycling Committee that we formed to reinvent how recycling works at Free Geek. Doing this allows us to explore how the receiving area can best be organized without hiring an exploratory intern.

The 23- or 24-hour/week Job Experience Receiving Intern would, after a short training period in Basic Receiving, Basic Testing, Prebuild, and Recycling, spend 20 hours a week overseeing Basic Receiving, and spend 3 or 4 hours in meetings and doing administrative tasks (reading email and updating Basic Receiving documentation) per week.

Because responsibility for the more advanced hardware identification will be pushed off to those working in Advanced Receiving, the Receiving Committee decided to attempt to recruit a Receiving Intern with more people-oriented and organizing skills so that volunteers would be very well taken care of (and hopefully stick around longer-term in the Basic Receiving area), and donors would receive excellent customer service.

The Receiving Intern would receive guidance from staff on the Receiving Committee (Liane, Dave, Michael, Shawn, and Nathan right now), who, with one exception, all work at least one Basic Receiving shift, as well as from those collective members staffing Advanced Receiving.

Issues Raised

Some issues were raised at the council meeting regarding the proposal. Here's a partial list:

Historical Information

• Coverage of Receiving Area from opening day until the present.
  • How was it done? Who did it?
• Interns that have worked at Free Geek.

Questions and Answers

What are the types of staff positions at Free Geek?

There are three types of positions (broadly speaking):

Collective Members

(definition goes here)

Job Experience Interns

(definition goes here)

Exploratory Interns

(definition goes here)

Do most interns get hired on as staff members?

Do most exploratory interns result in staff positions?

Where is the report from the Receiving Exploratory internship that is now ending?

Who made the proposal? How did it come about?

The Staff Collective formed a Receiving Committee to look at the issue of how to staff receiving shifts following the current internship. The receiving committe forwarded their suggestions to the staff collective and the proposal was sketched out by the staff collective and the HR committee. The proposal ideas were then presented at the council meeting but the actual proposal text was not available, so it is being worked out right now.

What happens to receiving while we sort this out?

Matthew's shifts are still on the schedule. After Matthew's internship ends (beginning March 25) these shifts will be covered by existing staff or substitute workers until a longer term solution is settled upon.