TFN goes prospecting

Very recently the Des Moines group decided that its disillusionment with The Freecycle Network had gone a step too far, and so they have broken away. It hasn’t take long for TFN to create an AstroTurf group. As I look the new group has just 94 members. A long way to go to catch up with the real Des Moines group which has over 6,000 and which has now affiliated itself with the free-thinking ReUseit Network!

The origins of RealCycle

There is a nice synopsis of the RealCycle Network on WikiBin. What it shows is a network that is not going to sit on its laurels but is trying to reach out to try different and related forms of freecycle styled groups. Most interesting is their work to reach out to school children, in what they call Real Educate. I would commend their avant garde thinking to anyone interested in moving forward.

No Shows unravelled

One issue that plagues many groups that freecycle is the issue of No Shows. A No Show occurs when one person offers an item, and accepts that another person can have it, only to find that the other person never shows up to collect the item. I have looked at what is available as advice on the issue of No Shows, and given its importance and prevalence I think it is high time someone told the truth. So here goes.

Grouply launches freecycling features

The grouply website which provides an alternative “social networking” front end to your Yahoo Groups has launched a set of features aimed at freecycle and reuseit network groups and communities.  To help explore these I have launched a Yahoo Group aimed purely at gaining a better understanding of these.  Also I am hoping to attract Grouply’s powers that be into this group so you can fire your questions right at ‘em.  This group is called grouply_and_freecycling.  This forum is aimed at anyone interested in grouply and freecycle.

It’s the wrong trousers, dammit!

Creating and running a freecycling group is a piece of cake. When I say this I am definitely NOT trying to trivialise the amount of effort involved by determined and conscientious owners and moderators. What I am trying to say is that any owner or moderator can do what they do from the comfort and safety of their own home at nearly no extra cost apart from a few hours each day or week. Along with this no-one particularly has to change their lifestyle. That’s the truth of running a yahoo group, or a google group or a whatever facebook activity. This is the beauty of the Internet. It is a virtual world we all can inhabit, extending our reach to people and places we could otherwise only dream of. And, in the instance of freecycling that reach helps us feel closer to others in our local community as we give and take items along freecycling guidelines.

That’s the good bit.

The bad bit is if we try to extend our virtual world into the real world. Every time we do that their is a real and very tangible cost. And those costs can become very scary very quickly. If we put our group or groups on display in a village fete or some council event we have to provide organisation. Organisation means publicity. It means staffing (ok everyone is a volunteer, but let’s skip that bit and assume it is “a given” for now). It means insurance such as public liability. It means explaining what you are to other organisations - such as councils.

And this is where life gets difficult. Councils have very different agendas. Councils are not interested in on-line groups - they are interested in reaching their communities effectively. And I use that word effectively intentionally. Effectively for them is not just an ad-hoc word it is something they need to prove. They don’t need to prove it just to pass the time of day but they need to prove it as enshrined in law.

Enshrined in law are words like accessibility, race and ethnic relations, gender discrimination. In our virtual world we don’t care or if we do then we hardly worry about such issues. If a particular owner or moderator is a racist or perhaps has very strong religious ethics or has some other point of view that affects their work we hardly know about it and their is no machinery in place, and it is difficult to conceive of how to either monitor or implement checks and balances to protect against any form of discrimination.

Discrimination inside freecycling is an ignored issue.

You can prove this yourselves by just looking at the members of your groups. By definition they have access to computers and the Internet, and so this means it takes a certain slice through society.  I could be very wrong, but if I was to guess then 90% of freecyclers across the globe are Caucasian.

Now Freecycle UK has obtained funding in association with London, UK. Wow. On the surface this looks good - some real money for once. But what does this mean. Does it mean that suddenly Freecycle UK has to produce pamphlets in Gujarati, Hindi and who knows how many languages. What?

You see what I mean? Suddenly if Freecycle UK attends any council event in London they have to demonstrate “accessibility”, regardless of race or creed etc. I am sorry but this is a joke.

I am all for accessibility and feel that I am as anti-racist a person as I possibly can be but any such investment if it goes in this direction is A COMPLETE WASTE OF TAX PAYERS MONEY. I mean suppose someone who does not speak English actually understands the leaflet about freecycling when rewritten in their home language then they go online and find that the group only runs in…. English.

You see where I am going to I am sure.

Do you know the most popular surname is in England? It is not Smith. Instead it is Singh. But if you look in the phone book you will not find many Singhs. This is because they have their own phone book. What I am saying is that if you are going to go down the accessibility route then you need a whole machinery of people, translators, Internet access, foreign language Yahoo groups etc etc.

Woops, did I say foreign language Yahoo groups? Of course TFN is building and rolling out its own website. Will this website be capable of dealing with Hindi? I think not.

The bottom line here is that freecycling works well for those people who are online right now. However there are cultural assumptions that make that activity easy for owners, moderators and members. Go outside those norms and you need a big, a very big budget. Go into that real world and suddenly you need professional translators, cultural advisers, serious website development teams.

Overnight you need to become incredibly professional. And overnight you are no longer going to be staffed by volunteers.

I just hope that Freecycle UK knows what it has done.  The astrologist in me predicts a lot of pain and a lot of work, unpaid work and work with few rewards, if any.

The Untouchables

TFN have a new contender to fight - the Australian Recyclers Community. This is interesting in that normally TFN hides behind Yahoo’s paranoia over a legal debacle and abuses that fear to ensure Yahoo deletes groups, which Yahoo has the authority to do. But by contrast this Australian community seems little or nothing to do with Yahoo and so TFN attempting to use Yahoo as a pawn will not help them. Indeed this one is particularly interesting to watch since also any of TFN’s trademark claims - however fraudulent or tangible - will have no legal status in Australia. Though I am sure that won’t stop TFN claiming they have fully registered trademarks etc as well as sending a flood of Cease & Desist letters. I mean smokers have difficulty giving up smoking often claiming denial, why would TFN behave differently? (No insult intended to smokers.) Also as far as I know TFN has no legal status in Australia.

Is this therefore a true Untouchable?

Gushing into the New Year

Call me cynical.

As we start the New Year with Christmas receding we all like to think of the nice things. Sadly Christmas (or Xmas) or whatever you think of this time of year is a time when people spend, spend, spend. Buy, Buy, buy. People buy presents, many of which are sadly unwanted, many of which clutter up our homes. How many of you can remember having been more interested in the cardboard boxes than the contents? Christmas is a time for giving, which companies translate into people spending money at a rate of knots. Credit card companies see this as a bounty time of year when cards are maxed out. And when the dust settles we all start freecycling to help git rid of unwanted presents, hopefully to more loving homes.

Amongst all this freecycling many people - hopefully - find local freecycle groups for the first time. Journalists looking for a happy-go-lucky story expend valuable column miles on freecycling stories. Oh how wonderful. Take this one as just one of hundreds of examples so easy to find.

Don’t get me wrong, like the person next to me freecycling helps us all think hard about our capitalist ways. It allows people to make our festive season a cheaper experience, to find more rewarding homes for unwanted presents. But surely there must be something more meaningful about Christmas than restating mantras such as one man’s is another man’s treasure. Like the many food excesses, such epithets just make me want to vomit.

freecycle shares top of green Yahoo searches

Somewhere deep inside the depths of a report on Yahoo about Britney Spears you can read the word freecycle is a very green word.

Grouply launches contest of Yahoo Groups users

Grouply, the web 2.0 styled interface to Yahoo groups has launched a competition for users who bring new users.  To sign up via my link click here.  Although grouply is not quite there yet, it is getting pretty damned close.  As well as hopefully soon aggregating both google and yahoo groups into one place they also are adding specific features for freecycle users.  Right now they have “for sale” type postings, for freecycle these obviously just need the word NOT adding!

Without jesting further I feel there is a real future here and commend everyone to take a look.  To help new users I have even started a yahoo group for grouply users called the grouply-faq, which you are welcome to join.

Four years, and counting…

For four years The Freecycle Network has been vaunting a new website, that Yahoo was only “temporary”, that a new website was only a year away.  It looks closer today than ever, but how close is close.  As the year closes to an end will the new fully functional website be up and running?  I think we all know the answer to that.

Let no-one go away from this and say that I castigated TFN for trying.  Getting IT projects right is a thankless task.  TFN have tried and will continue to try and my guess is that  year ahead we will be little further on, sadly.

Let no-one go away and say that Richard Wallman did not know his stuff, because he clearly does.

Where the split occurs is in what the centre thinks is needed, what with its resources it can possibly deliver - and what the customer needs.   That is a chasm that makes the Grand Canyon to look like a rut in the side of the road.