Getting organized. Plus, Feb 23 at ANE!

Hi everyone,

It’s time for an update!

In this post:

• Growing and improving our organization’s internal operations.
• Developing efforts to broaden our impact without increasing capital requirements.
• We will be giving a panel at Anthro New England on February 23, 2019!

Growing and improving our organization’s internal operations

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes to improve how our  organization runs. As you might imagine, it will take a lot of work to  accomplish our goals. Increasing efficiency, scalability, and robustness  are all paramount.

The best news here is: we now count 17 formal volunteers among our ranks!

That’s a lot of person-power – and it’s the responsibility of our management to make sure it’s used wisely.

To this end, we’ve been setting up a more formal power structure,  making expectations associated with roles simpler and more actionable,  and empowering our people to make decisions faster on areas they’re  experienced in. Briefly, we have created six operating Groups –  Outreach, Community, Infrastructure, Research, Corporate, and  Personnel.*** Each unit reports to the Board, and each unit is advised  by our Chief Volunteer Officer (CVO), a position commonly used in  nonprofits roughly equivalent to a Chief Executive Officer.

The effort is already paying off, and our viewers will start to see a  visible difference within a few weeks. I want to call attention to the  following especially:

• Our Community Group has taken over management for our Discord  server, which has been growing at a solid rate through purely  organic/word-of-mouth growth, and has developed a remarkably friendly  and focused atmosphere thanks to both our great moderation team and  fantastic users.
• Our Infrastructure Group has been setting up more efficient and  organized communication methods for our volunteers, and has also  initialized servers for both a wiki and a forum. The forum will be  managed by the Community Group. The wiki is currently being managed as a  secondary effort of the Research Group (in addition to its primary  academic role), but this may change as it matures.
• Our Personnel Group has been implementing a much more efficient  onboarding process for our volunteers, including development of  easy-to-understand protocols and checklists. Looking forwards, it is now  developing additional capabilities to help make sure our volunteers are  working with each other optimally, including via a standing mandate to  continuously observe and advise on possible improvements in interactions  and work-flows.
• Our Outreach Group is still developing, and several visual artists,  writers, and videographers have enthusiastically offered their help.  We’re still working on finding an ideal candidate for leading this group  – but seeing solid progress nonetheless.

Developing efforts to broaden our impact without increasing capital requirements

As our structural improvements are starting to pay off, we’ve been  able to look ahead and consider the best ways that the Freedom of Form  Foundation can advance our mission. Many of these efforts are only now  possible since we have broadened the base of people that can make key  decisions!

As briefly alluded in the previous section, we are starting both a  wiki and a forum. These have somewhat similar goals in terms of letting  people collect and share knowledge, and start to figure out additional  technical challenges that need to be overcome. However, the wiki is  naturally more for organizing information. We hope that at some point,  this wiki may become a reasonably authoritative source of information  relevant to morphological freedom – but we know it will take a while to  get there! On the other hand, the forum is intended more for active  problem-solving, and open-ended sharing of ideas.

We’re also starting a talent-matching program, at the suggestion of  our Chief Community Officer. In this program, we have begun working with  small startup companies that can be considered allies in our mission,  and matching them to key people within our social networks with needed  skill sets. Actually, we have already made one matching recommendation  under this program – prior to publicly announcing its existence! We  expect this program could turn out to be one of the FFF’s key  contributions to morphological freedom.

We believe the above programs will make our academic research more  effective and efficient by accelerating the sharing of knowledge and  ideas, and helping build alliances. Also, due to their negligible cost,  we can start advancing our mission immediately before funding is  sufficient for academic research!

We will be giving a panel at Anthro New England on February 23, 2019!

The third item to discuss today is that the FFF is hosting a panel at  Anthro New England! This will be in Boston, Massachusetts, on Saturday,  February 23 from 3pm-4pm, in Panel Room 3.

Michael Norsworthy and Daniel Davies will be presenting. First, we’ll  talk about our strategies and research areas of interest. After that,  we’ll open the floor for questions and discussion.

We are also working on a bit of a surprise for attendees that should  be quite interesting and insightful. As this development proceeds, we’ll  tease a little bit more information – but hopefully without giving away  the surprise too early!

We hope after attending our panel, you can help inspire others about  what’s possible with the right effort – and to help Make It Real.

Kindest regards,
Michael Norsworthy, PhD
President and CVO, Freedom of Form Foundation

***Outreach, Infrastructure, and Personnel Groups are similar to what  many corporations call Marketing, Information Technology, and HR.  However after careful consideration we are giving them somewhat  different powers and responsibilities that should enhance their ability  to help the FFF operate and grow optimally.