Talk:Volunteer strategy consultation 2015

This is a good place to provide general feedback on the volunteer strategy consultation

I welcome all attempts to bring more volunteers into the charity's activities and I'm glad that the Board and Office are taking steps to encourage that.

However, as I was a strong proponent of non-board committees as a means of attracting more volunteers into regular activity in liaison with the Board and Office, I am naturally disappointed to see the suggestion of replacing them with working groups. Working groups are, by definition, made up of subject specialists, focussed on singular objectives, and time-limited by nature. When a working group has accomplished its task, it disbands. I would suggest that those features are precisely the features that we do not want if we are to encourage greater participation by volunteers. We need volunteer groups to be open, so that nobody feels they don't have the expertise to contribute; we need them to be responsive to change in their focus; we need them to have the ability to consider multiple topics in their area of interest; and we need them to have a continuous existence, preferably independent of the Board and Office, to allow them the additional role of "critical friend" of each of those. --RexxS (talk) 15:30, 5 June 2015 (BST)

Thanks @RexxS:. Guess we should've checked Wikipedia(!). So the intention here is to have a fairly open discussion about how we should define these groups - so feedback on scope and composition is useful. But more importantly in this case it certainly isn't our intention to imply that the working groups should be temporary or made up solely of subject experts. They might be closer to 'special interest groups' (more permanent and composed of people with that interest, as the OKF seems to use) but that maybe implies (1) expertise is required, and (2) that they're almost peripheral to core activity (which is of course not the intention here). Maybe we need to think of another name? Sjgknight (talk) 15:41, 5 June 2015 (BST)