Below are the kinds of roles you might take on (and you are not making an open-ended commitment – all that is negotiable, unlike your pay, which is fixed at 0.00 quid per
hourweek.The crucial thing is, if you are volunteers, the only way we are going to get the best out of you is if you are happy. So we want you to have opportunities to learn new skills, etc. That is crucial to us. Also, we know that people have to step back from commitments at short notice because, well Shit Happens. We won’t guilt you into sticking around, because we want you to be able to come back at a later date.
General Purpose Member (GPM) , or “tool”
Someone who is willing and able to do a variety of tasks, including research, (including Freedom of Information Act, advanced googling etc), social media work (twitter, facebook), drafting reports, proof-reading, meeting design, facilitation, attending scrutiny committee meetings and gathering info, post-mortems, writing letters to newspapers, lobbying councillors etc. [Somebody who has the skills/training to do ALL of these will be labelled a “Complete Tool”.]
Meeting Co-ordinator (“Hammer”) for the Scrutiny Committee meetings. [to be called ‘Hammer’ as in MC Hammer] CEM will be attending Scrutiny Committees wherever possible/relevant. The art of making those meetings less excruciating for everyone (especially first-timers) will be the responsibility of the MC – this is not a task we would ask anyone to do more than two meetings in a row, for fear of falling foul of the Human Rights Act…
Policy Expert (“Organ Grinder”), someone who is an expert, or works to becoming an expert in a particular area – who aims to know a policy inside out, upside down, back to front, and what could be done better. [To be called organ grinder, because they have a couple of policy monkeys on the go]
Understudy = understudy to a PE – somebody who is getting up to speed on a particular policy, in the expectation that the PE won’t always be around. Ideally every PE would have a US, but yeah, well… They are also known as policy monkeys, which makes the Policy Expert their organ grinder.
This page will also give further details on OTHER specific roles, around signature collecting, post-morteming etc. But for now, it will do…