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Last active December 9, 2021 17:46
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Talking about makerspace management and hackerspaces
11:31 AM <LesaraRose> Sorry. I have a lot of questions lol
11:33 AM <TheWill> hardest: inspiring volunteers. work: being everybody's surrogate parent because they were ~20yo and antisocial and didn't know how to avoid generating a storm of drama everywhere they go
11:34 AM <TheWill> the idea of "everybody contributes towards the common good" is great until you're dealing with people who can't resolve the "who washes the dishes" conflict with their roommate
11:35 AM <TheWill> in other words a balance of demographics is vastly superior even if less comfortable
11:36 AM <TheWill> having a paid community manager is in my opinion the most effective way to reduce drama
11:36 AM <TheWill> and burnout
11:40 AM <myself> Hardest: Getting our external image to reflect the diversity of stuff actually happening in the space. Our technical people get more attention than our artistic people, so it takes a lot of work to bring in more artistic people. Yet, when we take both technical and artistic projects to show off at an event, it's always the latter that get more comments. I haven't figured out why the tech-heavy percept
11:40 AM <myself> ion continues to dominate.
11:40 AM <myself> Nah, that's not hardest. That's just the one that's been on my mind the most lately.
11:42 AM <myself> Hardest is probably getting people to continue realizing that they need to help, even after the space is grown and looks good. I think in the early days, it was obvious that members were also volunteers, there were lots of obvious things that needed help. Now, the rules are less in flux, the floor plan is pretty solid, the organization feels pretty mature, so people would have to look harder to find t
11:42 AM <myself> he places help is needed, and instead, they look less hard, because they think help isn't needed.
11:43 AM <TheWill> myself: way we helped the perception thing was a regular digital camera with an Eye-Fi card hooked to Flickr; that way the creator can easily self-document without having to worry about uploading, and web people can publicize without having to coordinate
11:43 AM <TheWill> http://www.heatsynclabs.org/ the front image is just pulled from flickr
11:43 AM ⇐ LesaraRose quit (423e4b60@gateway/web/freenode/ip.66.62.75.96) Ping timeout: 246 seconds
11:44 AM <TheWill> myself: good point on volunteerism. we instituted weekly member meetings which are 30% discussion 70% cleaning / volunteering. we call it "hack your hackerspace"
11:45 AM <TheWill> the volunteer portion is usually begun with a whiteboard and "what needs to be done"
11:45 AM <myself> TheWill: Yeah, we do a ten-minute "broom party" as part of each meeting, and then a quarterly space-improvement-work-party we call "potlock" for silly reasons.
11:46 AM <myself> We have a digital camera with an eye-fi, but it's not very well used. Should flog that more..
11:46 AM <TheWill> also, brainwashing i mean orientation is very important. words that were said a year ago need to be repeated for new members, language needs to be tweaked for maximum effect. new member orientation is boring but very important and effective
11:46 AM <myself> https://www.flickr.com/photos/97346106@N03/
11:47 AM <TheWill> yeah, hence the "community manager" idea. a lot of this stuff is very "maintenance of people's expectations and suggestions" that feels like a broken record
11:47 AM <TheWill> honestly i went in to running a hackerspace feeling like a teenager and came out feeling ready to be a father
11:47 AM <myself> Yeah, our new member orientation includes a "quiz" that's not graded, it's just a self-guide scavenger-hunt to learn how to find informatoin. A few folks have said it's the only think they actually learned anything from, and suggested expanding it to several pages, perhaps with a "do this one today" and "do this one your first week" strategy
11:47 AM <myself> lmao
11:48 AM <myself> parental feeling++
11:48 AM <myself> especially when the group does something you know is stupid
11:48 AM <TheWill> cheers, i3
11:48 AM <myself> and you're like "welp, you have to learn this one way or the other"
11:48 AM <TheWill> i just stepped down after like 4 years
11:48 AM <myself> I'm not on the board of directors this term, after 4 years :)
11:48 AM <TheWill> let somebody else grow up
11:50 AM <TheWill> ugh the heatsynclabs wiki is down right now but we have a new member walkthrough. a bulleted list for members to walk a new member through the space and tell them everything they need to know. it's a bit wordy though, quizzes may help with the eyes-glazing-over
11:50 AM <TheWill> then again it might pose yet another obstacle to shy members
11:53 AM <TheWill> the hsl philosophy is about removing obstacles between people and doing cool things. there are a lot of obstacles out there, from computer access to using a wiki to participating in email lists to coexisting in the same room with people you don't like
11:53 AM <myself> we have https://www.i3detroit.org/wiki/HOWTO_Process_a_new_member
11:53 AM <myself> and hit that "new member sign-up sheet", that's the other half of it
11:54 AM → Lesararose joined ⇐ Woraati quit
11:54 AM <myself> wb Lesararose
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