19 Feb
2022
19 Feb
'22
3:19 p.m.
On Sat, 19 Feb 2022, Alexander Papazoglou wrote:
I don't have any concrete suggestions other than
finding a way to make
stuff transit though sudoroom in a more orderly fashion. Like with planned
events, maybe in concert with other hackerspaces. But I'm probably just
echoing Joule's sentiments there.
I listed concrete suggestions: I said "come and get involved, spend time
understanding what we have and why, and make an impact."
However, I think saying that people who don't like
the space as it is should
just go elsewhere is not good policy.
I understand that that's what people are interpreting from my email, and that
is not what I meant. I tried to be clear but I realize that it didn't work.
I was saying that people who want an empty room should not try to make sudoroom
into an empty room. There are other places for that, and I support that, but
like I said, sudoroom (to me) is a place where we have tools and materials in
addition to clear and clean workspace.
And I wish that people didn't interpret my email as telling people not to come
to the space, when I repeatedly and clearly said that what we need is for
people to come to the space and help make it better.
Firstly it's exclusionary whereas the spirit of
the space is meant to be as
inclusive as reasonably possible, and secondly it selects for people who have
high clutter, disgust and hazard tolerance thresholds. While I score high on
those metrics, I would like the space to be open to people who don't, and I
think we would benefit from having members on that side of the "spectrum". We
don't need to make it a yoga studio, but it can be more like an organized
shop, can't it?
Alex
yes, I agree with you 100%. And I think that the way to get there is for more
people to come to the space and contribute to making it nicer. You and I have
already been doing that and we will continue to do it. I am planning to do a
large e-waste run soon (in the next couple of weeks) and I put work into
preparing that every tuesday night after people leave.
I understand that my previous email was pretty long and didn't succeed in
getting through what I was trying to say.
I think that it would be really nice to have the space clean and organized and
inviting, and the way we will do that is by people coming into the space and
cleaning and organizing it. There is no substitute for that, and people who
think that turning away donations (which have supplied literally everything in
sudoroom) are mistaken, and their suggestions harm us and don't help anything.
-jake
On Sat, Feb 19, 2022 at 12:24 AM Jake via sudo-discuss
<sudo-discuss(a)sudoroom.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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