Holiday hours logistics

The basic plan

The Holiday Hours Plan is to pay three people for 8 hours per day (24 hours) each day, mostly on Sundays over the holiday season in 2008-2009.

Specifically, we would be open on:

• Nov 23 (Sun)
• Nov 28 (Fri)
• Nov 29 (Sat)
• Nov 30 (Sun)
• Dec 7 (Sun)
• Dec 14 (Sun)
• Dec 21 (Sun)
• Dec 28 (Sun)
• Jan 4 (Sun)

Skeleton crew

The initial skeleton crew of paid staff would be:

• 1 person in the store.
• 1 person in receiving.
• 1 person at FD for volunteer sign-in and receipt generation.

During part of the day the Receiving and FD people would spell each other for lunch and breaks. This means that whoever is left at receiving and FD would do a little double coverage.

Todo list

This items should be organized and in place in order to try this experiment:

Warehouse

Liane and Ian say these tasks will be easy to accomplish.

• a place for CRTs to wait until Tue
• a place for random stuff to wait until Tue
• a place on Printer Island for stuff to wait

Production

These tasks will require some extra testing hours up front.

• Extra stock for the store in highly sellable items:
  • wireless devices
  • mobos
  • PDAs
  • MP3 players
  • keyboards, mice
  • speakers
  • more?
  • AS MUCH TESTED AS POSSIBLE

Personnel

I've started a survey to see who would want extra hours, etc.

• Someone with an I key needs to be around for laptop lockup and hard drive storage in the TARDIS
• Find staff people to do these shifts.
• Cross train any staff people that need it.
• Find targeted, responsible volunteers to help.
• Have someone with a safe key for opening and closing
• Have a sysadmin on call in case
• Have backup subs on call in case a staffer is sick
• Schedule time off for Sunday staff so they don't burn out, and/or pay them extra for the extra hours.

Advertising

These are routine and should be easy to accomplish:

• Web page change
• Send out email to core, council, e-newsletter lists
• Put something on phone message

This is a bigger job and needs some work done:

• A mailing? Do we want to do a mailing about this?

Other steps to plan for

• Pre-prepare tills.
• Ice cream and puppies
• Plan what to do when volunteers walk in and want to help (even if you don't want them to help)
• Line up backup tasks for volunteers in case the donation stream is light.
• Linux Clinic happens on one of these Sundays. Work out logistics for that. Talk to them. Anyone else scheduled to use the space on these days?
• If the store floor project starts before this, it should be DONE before November 23.