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, often because we had no choice.

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. The adoption program was formed during this stage as well as the first distro, the ASS group, the education group, and the first adoption classes.

Informal collective

Three members that didn't have any staff meetings and decided things by word of mouth. The build program was formed during this stage.

Regular collective

Five to ten people that met on a weekly basis. The council was formed during this stage.

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. The Hardware Grants group and Collaborative Technologies started during this stage.

Partially decentralized collective

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