[sudo-discuss] Re: E-Waste Plan

I see what I feel are pretty harsh condemnations of something I think is an important part of hackerspaces/makerspaces like our sudoroom. I've been hosting tuesday nights at sudoroom for a while now, and trying to get people back into coming to the space and making use of it. We make use of a lot of different tools and supplies in the space, to build things, repair things, and ideate. We also make use of swaths of blank space on the tables. There is a spectrum of interest in the kind of hardware tools and materials we have in sudoroom. Some people are very comfortable surrounded by the many kinds of electronic and other bits we have, even though they're far from organized the way we would like them to be. Other people have zero interest, and would be most at home in an empty room with nothing but clean blank tables, good even lighting, and no visual clutter, like a nice yoga studio. Those people should definitely have that, and I encourage them to start with the disco room! It's almost there, although the floor is a little too "busy" but it could be coated with carpet or something. It would be a mistake for the second kind of people to entirely fail to understand the value of the materials we have, when the real issue is that we've faced a lack of human resources to curate the space. Over the years, sudoroom has received many donations of tools, raw materials, computers, monitors, TVBGones, monitors, soldering irons, monitors, printers, broken laptops, power supplies, oscilloscopes, 3D printers, and random stuff. Literally everything in sudoroom at this point has been a donation: the laser cutter, the tables, the light fixtures over the north half of the room (I salvaged them from an abandoned building, brought them and helped install them) yes, we get a lot of stuff that is not something we want to keep. The first thing that comes to mind is "printers" but a notable exception was when recently Hilary was able to score a useful and working printer from the main tables that had been dropped off just a few weeks earlier, by one of Sudoroom's long-lost co-founders. What keeps Sudoroom from being unusable due to too much clutter, as some people have reasonably claimed about the space recently? A lack of contributing effort. Joule contributed tons of effort in the past, and hauled off lots of stuff (although they are also the source of many things we still have) I have been putting hours every tuesday night (after others go home) sorting what we have, cleaning up, and preparing to make a big e-waste run. I've also given away lots of "donations" to people who would give them a good home, and i've even sold a few things (all money goes to sudoroom) and i'll do it again. Today, perhaps thanks to my encouragement, Ian gathered our huge excess of monitors and sorted them according to which ones we should keep, and the rest of them will be donated to https://techexchange.org which is an organization that distributes computers to low-income families in Oakland. Why didn't our excess of monitors get donated to them sooner? Because it requires human labor, and the pandemic has had us basically closed for two years. If you want to help sudoroom be a better place; less cluttered, more inviting, then come and get involved, spend time understanding what we have and why, and make an impact. But please don't be reactionary and wish for a blank and empty space, or whatever minimalist vision you have in mind that doesn't align with the spirit of material hacking and creativity that the space was founded on. -jake On Fri, 18 Feb 2022, David Keenan via sudo-discuss wrote: is shelving, piles should in less any it. like stuff. to a to time I pile. But room according by after to my with https://sudoroom.org/lists/hyperkitty/list/sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org/messag… >