Hello from Spain.
In our hackerspace, after many messy years, we finally decided to
redact an internal policy.
We had a (long) meeting where we defined what we wanted, after
that, one member made the formal writing, and after some
corrections via our mailing list, the definitive text was aproved
by all the members (in fact, it was an unanimous "yes").
Now we are facing with the problem of carrying out the norms, because it's not always easy, and sometimes it feels bad to apply some norms to people you know. But having the norm it's, undoubtely, the first step.
Our reccomendation is, plan a meeting with the only purpose of
redacting the internal policy, and use some tool to choose the
date (https://doodle.com).
That way anybody can suggest the day and hour, and you will get
the most involvement available. After that, nobody will be able to
say that he/she was "left out" in the decision.
Then prepare for a long meeting (ours was 4 hours), and go for it.
Everybody will have his own ideas, but with some discussion, you
will get a common ground sooner than you think.
If you understand spanish, you can read our internal policy here: http://hackvlc.es/RegimenInterno.pdf
Greetings
Enrique
Dear all, I'm a member of one of hackerpace that is having interpersonal issues now that could be described like this: Although it has about 50 of paying members, only few of these are actually active ( i.e at least showing up sometimes in place). It is practically impossible to ban somebody for anything (stealing etc.) as there is no any rule for this and as you can imagine single mis-behaving person can be a pain and there is no official way how to deal with it. Hackerspace has moved to the new place and it was a lot of work to rebuild it, some of members has put great effort in that while majority didn't care. There was a great mess in all of stuff after moving in, some of members has categorized stuff like parts, tools, wires etc. There were many dust-covered non-working projects project abandoned years ago so it was decided put these on the table and put it on mailing list in order to let owners know and let decide what to do with these. There was a huge flame war around this despite the fact that NO creations were intended to be thrown away just sort these out somehow (only junk like old PC power supplies having wires cut off were thrown out). Most of people didn't care about these old projects so these were put in the box and again NOTHING was thrown away. Now the place is more or less built up but there is no much of activity there as there are 2 movements in the hackerspace: First movement insists on actocracy but the problem is that leads in long-term to damaged projects/equipment of other people etc. Other movement would like to set more specific rules, for example: - option to ban persons acting against interest of hackerpsace (stealing etc.) - reward members putting efforts in making hackerspace running etc. - avoiding damaging of equipment so members wouldn't need worry about having some more sophisticated (and expensive) equipment there. It was told that actocracy / anarchy works in other hackerspace but no examples were given. This has got me an idea to simply ask how this is actually done in other hackerspaces. As you can probably feel, I'm in movement of setting up some rules in order to be able to keep some more sophisticated equipment in hackerspace without having it ruined etc. My question is: How do you organize your hackerspace? Does really anarchy/actocracy work for you or do you have some set of more specific rules? How do you deal with mis-behaving members ? How do you deal with equipment having damaged/stolen? Do you reward members having put some efforts in hackerpace running or just all members are equal? How do you deal with general mess made by people? How do you deal with abandoned dust-covered projects whose owner doesn't care about these anymore? Thanks in advance for your answers and putting some light in this. With respect, Mr.Holub --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss