Policy Development

Outlined below is a Process that Free Geek Uses to Develope and Document Policies and Guidlines. Check out the Policies page for catagorizied list, Or the wiki category of pages taged as policies.

Who makes policies?

Overall policies that affect all of Free Geek, policies that affect multiple groups, and policies that are controversial in nature are decided by the Free Geek Community Council (http://lists.freegeek.org/listinfo/council/). Other policies are more limited in nature and decided by the appropriate group or committee.

Developing a policy at Free Geek

When a new policy is proposed, we should put its text on a new page. It should be clearly labeled as a by including this text at the top of the page:

{{policy in development}}

This will include the following text:

This is a page concerning a policy or procedure in development.
Once fleshed out, we'll consider it for adoption as official policy at Free Geek.

Discussion about the proposal should take place in the discussion link for that page. From time to time a rough consensus will be formed around various points in the proposal and at that time the main page should be altered. This allows us to separate the general conversion (ideas that we talk about but may not end up in the proposal) from the actual proposal we end up making.

We need to keep in mind that folks who don't use the wiki will have opinions. These people should be encouraged to use the wiki, but current wiki users should also seek out and summarize their input, recognizing that not everyone who ought to weigh in on an issue will be a wiki user.

When a policy is finalized (when consensus is reached through the wiki, email lists, face to face meetings, and so on) we should re-label the main page as POLICY (as opposed to PROPOSAL). Using the category function in the wiki will make compiled lists of proposals and policies automatic.

Wiki page format for policies

Three sections in a page: header, policy, and notes.

{{Policy Header 
| PolicyName = policy name 
| notes = Note on what the policy is about/Scope of policy
}}
==Policy==
''Body that set the policy(s) on [lists.freegeek_meeting_Minutes Date Adopted].''
* Wording of the most recent agreed upon policy - as agreed upon
==Notes==
Include some or all of:
* Related policies
* Interpretation/Implementation/Commentary
* Examples/Background/History
* Exceptions/Ramifications
* Etc...

If a policy was approved in a meeting, include links to the meeting minutes and other supporting material. If you don't have the link, add the page to the "Link needed" category.