Freecycle UK - My opinion on the community's future

Now, the UK Freecycle community has been noted as carrying the most 'traffic' compared with other countries, and this dispute with the founders may mean that the groups get shut down, or new moderators from America get put in place instead of the current local moderators (Freecycle say they try to only have people local to the community as moderators).

What I wonder is whether we really need a central organisation of all of this. It seems to me, when I look at other similar communities gathered around a global 'aim', they don't rotate around a central core, but rather go their own direction, as with Linux User Groups (LUGs) which have many different forms and functions, some having social meet-ups, others primarily hosting events and talks.

Ultimately the current Freecycle groups (not counting the new MyFreecycle system) are hosted on Yahoo Groups (which I personally don't like), and the Freecycle.org site hosts a list of links to those groups. In theory anyone could do that, the only thing Freecycle.org have got is the name and the press coverage that makes the term well-known. I think we don't have to worry about that too much though, as the groups will float to the top of a localised Google search quite quickly once enough 'hub' sites and local blogs/press start to become aware of each group.

There are several other sites/groups/terms springing up, including GreenCycle, Freegle, RealCycle, ReUseIt and vSkips, among others. These are run in exactly the same way, listing and linking to Yahoo Groups.

What I'd prefer

I don't like Yahoo Groups, they're hard to read (even with Yahoo's effort of threading the conversations), and generally just a 'make do' solution for most communities that don't have the resources to do anything else.

What I suggest is for some web developers (myself included) to 'come to the rescue' by creating an Open Source project for a framework for hosting the things these communities aim to do... share stuff, and be social. The software produced by the Open Source project could then be installed by anyone wanting to host a 'branch' and the community can join in as they have done before, to a more targeted site. The community could then request new features from the developers (or build it themselves and contribute to the project), and after some time everyone will benefit.

The Freecycle Trademark

To get around the current strict monitoring of the Freecycle trademark I would propose a similar solution to the Linux (and other UNIX derivatives) approach of describing themselves as a UNIX-like operating system, by calling describing the groups as Freecycle-like communities, giving full credit to original Freecycle project, and also serving as a disclaimer that should clear any 'confusion' that has been noted on Wikipedia as a reason for some of the trademark disputes.

To be honest, I don't know if this post will help with any decision, and I know it might not read particularly well, but I'd be keen to hear what people think in the comments.