Current activities of the Freedom Team

This draft document is work-in-progress

Please note our preferred way of communicating with each other by email.

The Freedom Team is currently inviting the following inputs from its participants:

1. Ideas for a brainstorm at:  http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/brainstorm.html

2. Discussions around core beliefs, policy snippets and policy positions at:

http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/core-beliefs.html
http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/policy-snippets.html and
http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/positions.html

3. A short message and a photo for http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/members.html

4. Short articles for the next issue of the FTI magazine.

5. Questions and suggestions on action plan, resource plan, etc. – including the entire FTI website.

6. Articles for posting on http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/notes.html

Suggestions from a member:

Id suggest some steps:
1) Have a list with demographics and who-is-who of our group. Make sure we  know profiles of the group well enough. A moot point would be number of members physically in India.

2) Research policies and start reading and educating each other about them.

3) Start off some ground work as "citizen policemen/journalists" or something similar. Without doing something on ground, we may never generate a critical mass of people to support us. We may use several contacts from influential people but my instinct is that alone may not work.

4) As far as possible, try avoiding the talk about member and donor shortage. This point may be debatable, but my experience is that everyone knows about this problem, and pre-occupation with this at an early stage will lead to a decreased morale among existing members. Give people something  good to do at early stages of organizations, and they will automatically strive to work on increasing numerical and monetary strength.

How to contribute changes to existing documents

- Go to http://www.freedom.sabhlokcity.com/documents.html and select the relevant Word document, or the Home page and select the relevant Word version of the freedom family page.

- Download the Word version

- Track changes and add comments if necessary

- Upload the tracked document on the google group or send to Sanjeev separately

- These changes will be published with tracking both in Word and html

- Members can review the changes and accept/reject them over email

- Final version (each iteration will only be a draft, though) will then be uploaded.

New documents

We are looking for new documents in the area of policy brochures and policy blueprints, internal process documents, etc. If a member has prepared a totally new document, send it as a Word version and similary upload/ send it to Sanjeev.

Reading: FTI will follow world-best policies, so people on this team should spend 80% of their spare time in reading up the best books and journals in the world, and not be under the delusion that their own ideas, not honed in discussions and debates with the world's best thinkers, are going to be sufficient to help India. Our job is to AVIDLY absorb the world's best ideas and to implement them. World-best policy cannot be delivered without knowing the world-best research.

Writing: In the balance 20% of their spare time members of the team should write policy notes/ articles for FTI, some of which will form part of the FTI policy documents. That is how the credibility of the team will be demonstrated when it goes and asks for Rs. 200 crores for its first launch of 550 candidates at the elections.