GALE The Global Alliance for LGBT education
The Alliance is a virtual learning community. The membership is open to every individual who is actively involved in education about LGBT issues. Membership is not open for organizations. In a sense, GALE is like an association of professionals.
Members of GALE are both professionals and/or volunteers. They are heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. They hold different religions, cultural beliefs and perspectives on LGBT issues and on education. They join the Alliance to explore each others views and work together to become more effective in their work.
You can be a member in different ways. You can be relatively passive or rather active in the Alliance. We distinguish three levels of members: members, volunteer members and moderators.
Members can log in on the extranet of the website. They can read not only the summaries of articles, but also the full articles. They can add comments to articles. They can submit news and background articles. They can help other members by editing or translating articles. They can discuss issues with each other in several languages by e-mailing to discussion lists .
Volunteer members are members who are part of a Working Group. Working Groups have their own virtual area on the extranet which you can only enter when you are a member of the group. There are 3 kinds of working groups: Internal Groups which deal with the organization of the Alliance, Development Groups which focus on improving the content of education programs and implementation / effect, and Strategy Groups which focus on regional or local strategy and collaboration in projects.
Moderators are members who supervise the traffic and arrangements in the Alliance. They have editing rights to the whole website. They are responsible for checking the quality of the profile, news and article submissions. They recruit editors and translators for news items and background articles. They monitor the editing and translation process and allocate edus to members who did jobs for the Alliance.
Membership of GALE does not cost money, but it does cost some energy. GALE asks its members to invest every year 60 edu (the virtual currency of GALE) in the learning community. The value of an edu is about equivalent to a US dollar.
Edus can be earned by doing tasks for GALE, like being in a working group, submitting articles, translating texts or helping to moderate the website.
When you are logged in as a member, your amount of edus will appear in the right menu. At your first log in, it will be at -60. Sixty edus is the annual membership fee. This means you have to earn 60 edu in the next year. You will find an overview of jobs you can do to earn edus under the "edu" menu button.
We define the network as a learning community. The Alliance intends to keep the working arrangements of the learning community transparent and as simple and informal as possible. Formal arrangements, like in the Registration Act and the Alliance Guidelines mainly serve as a framework to fall back on in case of procedural conflicts. The Alliance deals with differences of opinion by defining them as learning issues. We do this by formulating hypotheses, negotiating ways to test these, and going on to develop methods to test effects in the real world. In discussing such strategies, we prefer to reach a working consensus. These principles and guidelines for acceptable behaviour are put forward in a Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct is part of the Alliance Guidelines.
The Advisory Board and Executive Director check the opinion of the members by asking them to vote on proposals for bi-annual strategy plans. In addition, Working Groups can put forward proposals to check the members opinion.