User:Martind

Martin Dittus, martin@dekstop.de, @dekstop. Long-time member, LHS trustee since late 2011.

The Hidden Laws of Hackspace

• We're not a school, company, or sports club: we don't provide structured guidance and training.
• The organisation is designed for minimal overhead. Nobody is being paid to help fix your problems.
• A little bit of passion goes a long way. Most work at the Hackspace happened because someone was curious.
• We don't focus much on outreach, structured introductions, presentation. Consequently our "induction experience" sucks.
• If you come here unprepared: be patient and make time for a long learning experience. Observe and talk to the people around you.
• Don't be annoyed if you don't understand right away. Sometimes there's a good reason, sometimes it's simply a large group's path of least resistance.
• We're a community workshop. Your best first experience is when you come with a project in mind, and need a little bit of help or access to tools we may have.
• There is no committee and little leadership. We're a social space that is heavily shaped by its interpersonal relationships.
• Making change is hard: it involves lots of initiative, and the patience to try again until you find the right way to make it work. This is by design. (And yes, it's not always good.)

All of these are shaped by:

• Hacker ethics, which inform many of our key values: decentralisation as default organisation principle, the hands-on imperative, merit before status, mistrust of authority, etc.
• The practical implications of running a structureless organisation
• The need to protect a shared resource: the community, the space, and its materials
• etc.

Pages

• /LondonSpaces -- a list of misc other hackerspace-type organisations in London
• /Broken -- perceived LHS problems people currently complain about at the Hackspace.
• EMF 2012 (wiki archive, archived user page, old meeting minutes)
• Propaganda: The Cost of Hacking (github)
• Bitcoin Weekend 2011
• Pachube/Nanode evening at London Hackspace
• /Young Hackspace
• /Document Log Discovery Platform
• /LfmHardwareAuction
• /Spacewarming

Member Manual

Pages I'd include in a member's manual:

Welcome

• Guides/GettingStarted
• Membership
• Subgroups
• Weekly_Open_Evenings
• Laboratory_24/Getting_There
• List_of_mailing_lists, IRC

Howto

• Guides, esp:
  • Guides/Using_the_space
  • Guides/Bringing_items_to_the_space
  • Guides/Planning_an_event
  • Guides/Running_a_pledge
  • Guides/Filming_in_the_space
• Maintenance, Maintenance/Adopt-a-Spanner
• Faceplant

About us

• Organisation
• Organisation/Trustees
• Rules
• Grievance_Procedure

Useful resources/links

• Suppliers

Hackspace culture

• Other_Hackspaces
• Starting a Hackerspace

I don't think it's worth including pages like Infrastructure, Projects, OneHundredThings, Training_Directory, Equipment, Project:100_Paper_Cuts -- they're useful resources but very badly maintained and always out of date.

Spc Mgmt

There's a need for better tools to manage your highly successful hackerspace. Here are some free ideas. Get in touch if you end up building one of these!

Unsolved

• Pledge drive automation (it's possible to use Semantic MediaWiki and Wiki forms for this, see pledge drives at Technologia Incognita for an example)
• Registration and announcements for training sessions (e.g. Lasercutter_Training)
• Component ordering tool. E.g. a simple tool for re-ordering things we want to keep on stock (see consumables), a collaborative components shopping list for larger projects, a tool to group purchases of individuals to reduce shipping cost, etc.

In Progress

• Member decision-making tools: discourse and consensus testing (lots of people are working on such software atm, and there's our own OneClickOrgs. See also: [1])
• Tool access control linked to member accounts

Done

• (Is anything ever done?)

Trustee Induction

Things to go over with new trustees.

• Set up IRC with bouncer, add to directors channel
• Add to trustees@ email
• Share Dropbox
• Create OCO account
• Add their keys to the passwords file
• Have them read the Rules, the Grievance_Procedure, and at least skim the constitution
• Review current issues: member warnings, recent/current mediation efforts
• Let them participate in a few day-to-day tasks (e.g. member disputes)
• Add them to the mailing list moderators list (if desired)
• Add them to the uk-hackspace-organiser-comms list
• If available: hand over keys from predecessor