Talk:Meta Question
This is a good historical perspective of Free Geek - it helped me get more of a feel of what it was like a few years ago. It's obvious that the programs at Free Geek have been constantly evolving, but it seems that now we're forced to evolve because of monetary issues (which, I suppose, is necessary and good in the long run). I'd look forward to a time when we're economically sustainable, can tie up loose ends in volunteer programs so they can take care of themselves more. Then, perhaps (maybe, perchance) staff and core will be a bit more freed up to take on new projects that they're inspired by.
Shawn 16:18, 12 Jan 2005 (PST)
As a philosophical matter, I think that organizations should reproduce rather than grow too big. What "too big" is, is an open question however, and organizations being what they are, multiple organizations tend to produce supra-organizations which then want to take more and more of the individual organizations power away. (Humans are a real pain in the ass.) More specifically, I think Free Geek could still grow without being "too big" but we should consider how much area we want to cover. Do we want all of Portland's recycled computers? All of Oregon's? If we were to split, would we want to see specialization or another exact clone? Would we want to split or clone? (There is a difference.) Do we want to determine the too-bigness on the basis of internal communication, the "need" for hierarchy, or land area covered? -- MW 15:50, 12 Jan 2005 (PST)
Sister Free Geek is a scenario about spinning off a new one when we get too big.
-- rfs 17:63, 12 Jan 2005 (PST)
Shawn says:
...have been constantly evolving, but it seems that now we're forced to evolve because of monetary issues...
Of course most of our evolution (all along) has been because of monetary issues. The store and the $10 monitor fee came along when we were about to go under (loss of expected DEQ grant).
The other side of this is that we grew quite rapidly due to demand for our services and this growth pushed several changes through (every increase in staff has been to add consistency or sanity or both) -- things like the waiting list, the build program, the twice daily tours, anything relating to the staff schedule, etc. Some of these drove up a need for the cash ('cause we had more staff).
-- rfs 18:22, 12 Jan 2005 (PST)
I expanded upon the section about what drives our historical stages.
-- rfs 11:39, 13 Jan 2005 (PST)
Computers per capita
Matthew says:
The population of the Portland metropolitan area (meaning the people who are easily in driving distance of Free Geek) is about 1.5 million. Lets say, for simplicity, that these people have an average of two computer systems, one for home, one for work (this is a way big oversimplifaction, since it would probably be easier to take the number of households rather than the number of people, and not everyone has a job that involves a computer).
So, this is about 3 million computers in the area. Which means, if we consider each one of them has an average of a half dozen peripherals, we have about 15 million gizmos.
Now, the rate of obsolescence varies from business to home usage, but we can say, to be conservative, every five years. That means about 3 million gizmos every year getting obsolete. Since it looks like we are on a rate to do somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand this year, Free Geek has reached about 3-5% of where we can go. Of course, not everyone will donate to Free Geek, but I think we could still realistically expect to get up to a million gizmos a year, with maybe several tens of thousands of those being systems.
If anyone wants to think about these figures some more, please feel free to do so.
rfs 15:13, 18 Jan 2005 (PST)
- According to some stats I found on the interweb [[1]] there were about 555 personal computers per capita in 2000 in this country. (Only San Marino, entirely surrounded by Italy had more.) I don't know their definition of personal computer, but we can assume more computers (personal and non-personal) than 55%, but 200% seems way off the mark. Lets say a rate of 55%, knowing that it's low.
- I also think we can break down the how many gizmos to computer ratio a bit more accurately. The database can help here:
fgdb=# SELECT gizmotype, count(*) FROM gizmo GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1; gizmotype | count -----------+--------- Monitor | 22,439 Other | 143,284 Printer | 14,652 System | 32,699 TOTAL | 213,074
- Seems like a 1:6.5 ratio between systems and total gizmos -- or about 5.5 gizmos come in with each system (after we've pulled and entered cards and such).
- Here's the yearly breakdown:
fgdb=# SELECT extract( year from created) AS year, count(*) FROM gizmo GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1; year | count ------+-------- 2000 | 2,326 (partial year) 2001 | 29,859 2002 | 34,897 2003 | 54,951 2004 | 86,490 2005 | 4,552 (partial year)
- That looks like maybe 137,000+ gizmos this year assuming something like current trends (the last two years are a steady 1.57% over the previous years). Accepting Matthew's five year lifecyle and 1.5 million people within driving distance and the rest of his formula I get:
- 825,000 personal computers in the metro area, meaning 5,362,500 gizmos
- 1,072,500 gizmos being discarded each year in the area
- 137,000 gizmos will be received at Free Geek this year (about 13% of the total).
- Not the 3-5% figure Matthew suggests, but 3-4 times that rate. Nevertheless, we could grow about eight times over (if everyone recycled and we had a monopoly). Of course that discounts folks who toss their gizmos in the trash, donate them to goodwill, or use other recyclers. It seems unlikely we'd ever have more than 50% of the market (less than four times what we get now), but that's still some room to grow.
- Caveats:
- Metro said we recycled 12% of the ewaste processed in the area in 2002. That is 12% of what was recycled. However, less than 15% was recycled, so our share was 12% of 15% or about 2%. That number's lower than my estimates, so take this all with a grain of salt.
- The more of this we want, the harder we have to try to get it. That is, if the best anyone could ever do is 50%, to get that 50% we'd have to market the hell out of Free Geek.