Receiving Internship Proposal Clarity Page

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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

When Free Geek opened its doors, Receiving was covered by volunteers.

As we developed the original staff collective shared duties covering receiving along with other duties at Free Geek (recycling, build, etc.) The job of covering these was called "Busy Bee" because it kept you on your toes. This job was shared by most collective members.

As Free Geek grew, we established the job of Operations Coordinator to cover Receiving, and (as necessary) Prebuild and Recycling. (Operations coordinators were Marlin and then both Marlin and Jon.)

Most collective members continued to cover Busy Bee shifts, however. As Free Geek grew further, we established time on the schedule to do shifts separately in each of these areas and the Receiving duties began to take up more of the Busy Bees' time. We renamed the shift from Busy Bee to Receiving as a result of this fact.

During the cutbacks, we eliminated one Receiving Coordinator job to save money and Marlin obliged, taking an early retirement. For a variety of reasons, staff members felt the receiving job was not evolving along with the rest of Free Geek, and when Jon left, we decided to try a new approach to get receiving more workable for us. The attempt at that point was to separate Receiving into Adavanced and Basic Receiving. We hired Matthew as an exploratory intern during this period which ended this Spring.

Questions and Answers

What are the types of staff positions at Free Geek?
There are three types of positions (broadly speaking):
Collective Members
These are long term members of staff that go through a fairly rigorous application and interview process to get hired. The bulk of all staff members are in the collective. The collective is responsible for hiring and firing staff and for the day to day operations of Free Geek.
Job Experience Interns
These are short term members of staff that are geared around jobs that will help people build job experience and resumes.
Exploratory Interns
These are short term members of staff that are geared around jobs that help the Free Geek staff experiment with new ways to perform jobs, or to explore new areas of work at Free Geek.
Do most interns get hired on as staff members?
No. Of the eleven interns that have been hired to work at Free Geek, only three were then hired into staff positions. Only two of those three (Steve and Michael) continue to work at Free Geek as staff members. Both of these folks were hired as exploratory interns.
Do most exploratory interns result in staff positions?
About half and half. There have been four exploratory interns, and two of them have been hired onto staff (see above question).
Prior to the establishment of the exploratory internship positions, we had three other proto-interns (we didn't call them interns back then, but they were kind of like what we now call exploratory interns). They were:
  • Ray (Exploratory Printer Program)
  • Nancy (Exploratory Tech Support Program)
  • Nathan K (Exploratory Build Program) (not to be confused with Nathan B, who is on staff)
None of these were hired onto staff.
Where is the report from the Receiving Exploratory internship that is now ending?
Matthew issued two reports that can be found in the council list archives:
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.
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