Production plan
Intro
Production is at the core of what Free Geek does, from attracting volunteers to producing the items that we give away and sell. Any major change it production over the years will cause change to Free Geek as a whole. We should try to predict what may happen so that we can be ready to adapt and make the changes positive ones for all of us.
The Future
Free Geek is going to see a decrease in the rate of change of our main incoming stream that Production has depended on all these years. The standard desktop computer system is becoming less and less prevalent in the world at large, and we are beginning to even see that trend a bit here.
If Free Geek does more outreach, and we get a larger share of systems in the door, we may not see an actual decrease in numbers of desktops, but we will get an greater influx of other devices: Laptops, Macs, PDAs, Nice do it all cell Phones (not the crappy free ones).
If we stay at our current level of incoming, most likely incoming desktops will lessen at the same time the other devices come in the door at an increased rate.
Production needs to be prepared for and aware of the possibility of shifting our main production line to laptops. To do this there would need to be another level of eval, or build, that can eval and process incoming laptops. Laptops are much harder to evaluate, and thus may not be appropriate for people becoming familiar with computers for the first time.
Production must also be able to handle an influx of devices that are rare enough that flow charts may not be adequate for teaching. To be able to test and process these devices we will need a larger advanced testing that maintains its culture of curiosity and willingness to teach. We may want at least a paid intern manning Advanced Testing in the medium therm future (2-3 years out). It is hard to predict which items would better be tested in Advanced testing or in Alt-build. Advanced testing would probably act as a staging ground for newer devices coming in to see if they are worth testing, and if so, to test them and create documentation for until the time when enough come in that it makes sense to push them into Alt-build for a broader pool of less trained volunteers to work on. Production needs to be prepared to be able to process unique, semi-unique and rare devices.
In summary, Production needs to be able to adapt to encompass many smaller and perhaps intermittent streams instead of depending on our old standard: The Desktop.