Re: [sudo-discuss] $ sudo reboot

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Hol Gaskill <hol(a)gaskill.com> wrote: Thanks for asking this, Hol. I've been sad about the shop area for a while. Some parts have been getting some love recently, and I'm very happy about that! Other things have disappeared and become harder to find. My last straw was last night, when one of our community members came by with a simple need, to file and hacksaw something. We found one very large file but not the smaller file we used to have at some point. We could not find any hacksaws at all. I know we had some before. It felt very symbolic. How can a hackerspace not have a hacksaw? We literally cannot hack! Personally, having all of these different elements in one physical space greatly increases the value of everything. While he was visiting he told us about the exciting solar panel project he was working on, and found potential leads for writing controller software for it. This was a conversation that wouldn't have happened if the shop were offsite, and I can't help but wonder how many more of these interactions we miss out on, by not having a good enough shop area. While there are challenges to having sawdust and metal shavings in the vicinity of laptops and food preparation, I think it's well worth meeting them. Noisebridge has a wonderful shop area - at last month's reprap building party, Miloh showed me some wonderful tools that had stayed around since 2008! All they had to do was enclose it. I think for our new space, an enclosed work area is a must. I'm afraid of sawing anything at Sudo because it commits me to then spending 10 minutes trying to track dust down behind a thousand nooks & crannies. And I'll still never get it all. People who came just to hack on some Javscript will leave coughing and rightfully upset. We took the cheap-upfront route, and we've been in debt ever since. Another example: our particle-board floor has been a huge limitation. I can count a number of projects, including a metal-printing one, which didn't happen or moved elsewhere because you just can't do it safely over our floor. It's unsanitary, a dust/germ/toxin magnet, hard to sweep, hard to vacuum, hard to find things you drop, easy to dent... We could learn something from Double Union, a space that recently opened in SF. When they rented their room, the very first thing they did was tear out the carpet and seal the floor in hard resin. Imagine the pain we would have avoided if we'd done that in our current "Art Studio"! Well worth the money, IMO. Which, speaking of money, my observation is that a lot of people who were involved in Sudo's early stages - 2011 & 2012 - were hoping for the fab & maker angle, and were disappointed by our meager facilities and started putting their money & energy elsewhere. I think reaching out to this crowd should be a component of our reboot. Our values and energy are so important - let's try this again. :)