So this is a rewrite of the previous blog by the same name after it was strangely deleted. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, so I'm assuming this is probably something I did. Still, I've changed my password to be on the safe side :)
Imagine you're an office manager for a law firm (for the sake of this example, 'Freecycle Associates'), your duties include organising the filing, opening and closing the office, answering phones, speaking to new clients, managing existing clients. You know, the usual stuff.
Now, imagine you become unhappy with your employer, you start to look around for new work, you find a startup company (for the sake of this example, 'Freegle Associates').
However, you like your office, your chair, you have your name on one of those little plaque things on your desk and your name is so very eloquently etched onto the frosted glass door to your office.
So, you speak to your new employer, make all the arrangements, and one Friday night, you decide that over the weekend, you're going to make that move.
Now, all seems fair enough so far, right?
Well, instead of actually moving to 'Freegle Associates', you instead change the locks on all the office doors, all of the 'Freegle Associates' staff are invited into what used to be the 'Freecycle Associates' office and all of the clients files are kept inside the same building.
So, Monday morning comes along and the 'Freecycle Associates' CEO says "Hold on just a cotton pickin' minute, you can leave the company, that's your decision, but you've kept all of our stuff, including our client files!".
"Well..." you reply, "...the way I see it is that I handle the client when they call, I'm the one who gets their coffee when they come in for an appointment and I'm the one who spends all that time filing their paperwork".
Well now, call me crazy, but as lovely as I'm sure you may be as an office manager, I'm going to go ahead and assume that the reputation and name of the law firm is the reason clients give business to the company. They don't arbitrarily choose a law firm because it's the first one they flipped to in the phone book (although, that's a possibility, I don't think it represents the majority).
So, if you, as an office manager want to go work for 'Freegle Associates', good for you. You'll be performing the same job, but to take something that doesn't belong to you isn't right, it just isn't.
So...you still with me?
When Freegle moderators decided they didn't want to stay within The Freecycle Network, I for one wish them all the success in the world. Go off, create a group, if you do well, people will join; if you don't, so be it.
But, to do so by simply renaming the group, disabling any Freecycle accounts and moving on (thus keeping all the members that had joined a Freecycle group) isn't fair to the members that joined that Freecycle group, it isn't fair to The Freecycle Network and it isn't fair to those of us who continue to volunteer our time to Freecycle.
Freegle, in my opinion, conducts itself inappropriately in this manner. And because they continue to do so, I, personally, can NEVER support Freegle.
The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,836 groups with 6,577,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by going to freecycle.org and entering it into the search box. Have fun!
An interesting debate. Sadly your argument fails at the first hurdle. The parallel of some kind of company associates relationship is not what TFN has in place. When I became a moderator of a group I signed nothing, nor was obliged to do anything with TFN. Nor did this happen when I became a group owner. However I have agreed to an agreement with Yahoo and thus behave according to Yahoo TOS. My experience is very very far from unique, in fact my experience is the rule.
ReplyDeleteTherefore I am obliged to obey Yahoo TOS. Where does that figure in your argument? Nowhere. Interesting.
Your analogy is missing quite a few pertinent details but anyway...If you found out that the boss ('Mr Freecycle') at Freecycle associates did absolutely no work at all to deal with the business at hand and actually abused his office manager. The same office manager that upheld the name of the company day in day out, increased business and did do ALL the work and did it happily and for nothing :) while Mr Freecycle was getting paid and behaved shrewdly and inexplicably, maybe (?) like he had plans to sell-on the value of all the office manager's good work...(that is of course after dismissing said office manager with no right of appeal and no explanation)...Then you may not be so surprised that that the office manager wanted to keep up the good work for all the customers without the original boss :) at a new company.
ReplyDeleteVolunteers should be valued and respected.
The IDEA of Freecycle is not rocket science and is not patented.
It is a FREE idea carried out for FREE by members and moderators....no matter what name they do it in.
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ReplyDeleteJames, your analogy where the employee is valued enough to have their name etched on the glass door speaks of an organisation that bears no comparison to the apparent disdain TFN has for the volunteers that actually GROW the business.
ReplyDeleteIn the origins of Freecycle, each local group was founded by a local group owner and more than likely grew organically in the first place with word of mouth recommendations by the GO and subsequently the end users. Newer groups have benefited from their "affiliation" to Freecycle and the publicity that has been generated both nationally and internationally but there wouldn't be anything to talk about without the grass roots activism that (used to) underpin the purpose Freecycle was originally set up to achieve: LOCAL people reducing their carbon footprint and landfill.
[I should point out that I have to generalise as I haven't spoken to all 500+ groups of course.]
To further expand on your analogy, the local office manager(s) attempted to speak to the CEO of "Freecycle Associates" to be told:
"You no longer fit within the organisation despite (1-5 years of faithful service, clear your desk, your telephone and email contact with your colleages is cut off, you can't even be a "customer". Of course, we'll introduce a new office manager who will take over your customer list, fail to look after the safeguards we (TFN) originally set up and not have any specific local knowledge about your customer base. Further down the line, we'll shut down your existing channel of communication with your customers and move them to our centralised system which is barely fit for purpose, subject to signficant capacity issues and woeful support.
And you, as the office manager, have no right of appeal."
I am aware that some large corporations *do* behave in this way when dealing with *employees* who "no longer toe the party line" but surely an aggregation of re-use groups, committed to local ownership and local governance should behave in a more egalitarian fashion.
FCNext and other Yahoo!Groups and blogs have charted the growing dissatisfaction many (former) Freecycle moderators have developed as a result of long term observation of the centralisation of control to Deron. This was originally embodied in a much looser agreement between the various GOs who chose to affiliate their groups and the Freecycle name.
The idea is great, the centralisation of control and lack of value placed on the local teams which actually do the work of growing Freecycle appears (from reading IAFCMods and other sources) to be at the heart of the UK split. This has happened before, it will surely happen again. As Robert Jordan says: the Wheel turns.
To further clarify, on this issue of polling before any move, in the past, Freecycle groups that have polled members have been delisted from the Freecycle.org website and the GO instructed to promote the InterimMod to Group Owner, leave the organisation and never darken the door again. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fcnext/ and http://freecycling.wordpress.com/ for some history on this...
ReplyDelete