Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Time for Actions

[Iain Roberts]

A couple of months ago at the FSUK-Manchester meeting, Aidan McGuire spoke 
about what we could achieve, and about making the North West a locus for strong 
Free Software activity.

>From my experience with varous organisations, I suggest that we need three 
>things to happen (in this order).

1. One person needs to take responsibility for making sure that decisions are 
reached - otherwise discussions can happily meander on for months.

2. As a group we need to decide how decisions should be made.  There's no one 
right answer to this: we might want decision making to be quick and snappy or 
slow and thoughtful; we might want everyone to vote or delegate the decision 
making to a small number of people, or to one person.  We need to find 
something that works and that we're comfortable with.  The person from (1) 
needs to listen to the opinions within the group, come up with a proposal for 
everyone to vote on and then badger people to vote until (hopefully) over half 
of us have supported one option.

3. We need to decide what we're going to try to achieve, and then how we're 
going to do it.

Number 3 is the big one, of course.  All the UK FLOSS groups are in a similar 
position: a small number of people trying to do something with very limited 
time and resources.  The Open Source Consortium has fewer than five active 
people and has done good work in the last year on challenging the BBC iPlayer 
download service only working on Windows XP and on promoting commercial FLOSS.  
The Open Schools Alliance has a similar number of people and has held a 
successful conference and raised the profile of FLOSS in parliament.

We could do a lot worse than to check any plans we come up with against the 
SMART goals:

S - specific, significant, stretching
M - measurable, meaningful, motivational
A - agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented
R - realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented
T - time-based, timely, tangible, trackable

Iain.

-- 
Iain Roberts
Axiom Tech
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