Thank you, Marc - this is more the direction I was pointed in but you articulated it.

I'm not actually suggesting that La Commune should be locked up, I was mostly hoping to reinitiate the conversation around maintaining as much open-ness of the space as possible (albeit, in a not very convincing way).

Perhaps more lockers / a members-only locked cabinet in Sudo for expensive / fragile equipment? We've discussed lockers for Omni members, in general - I know Patrik has been on the look out.

Also - for the record, TIL has offered use of their space for Omni admin work and storage of important documents as a way to better share it with the community.

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Marc Juul <juul@labitat.dk> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 3:31 PM, <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:

unless la commune maintains primary access to their space by passing through sudo room I'd say the 2 positions are consistent

I'm not sure I believe closing sudo/ccl off is going to change anything. I foresee that people will come in at some point during the day, open the doors to sudo room for the public and they will remain open until the building is closed up in the evening. If we were to require people to use access cards every time they move between sudo and the rest of omni then this would _really_ change the feel of openness that the Omni currently has. It would mean that not being a member of any given space is a much bigger issue, since you will then need to wait for someone to open the door for you even if you're just going to the kitchen and back. I'm sure people will propose something to the effect of "open doors between 10 am and 6 pm" but that again renders the whole system ineffective since it is likely that the thefts are happening in that time window. Then we can consider giving out "guest passes" to people that only work for internal access between sudo and kitchen/ballroom/basement within certain hours.

If we are closing parts of the Omni off to anyone (btw already the TIL office is closed off so this is not completely novel) then there are few remaining reasons I can think of to not allow La Commune to close itself. One is for access to sudo room/CCL from the outside, which we can provide through the back door anyway. The other is for other collectives to access the upstairs area after hours (most importantly the kitchen). This would involve some non-trivial amount of construction and probably permits, though the area around the staircase to the upstairs closest to sudo is infested with mold anyway so tearing it down to some degree might have to happen anyway.

I do see this as a major shift in how we think about and use the Omni and we should consider alternatives before we go this route. I think a closed and encrypted video surveillance system that can only be accessed through consent is a possible viable alternative that may be more effective than locked doors, and definitely would be easier to implement in the short term.

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marc/juul