Just wanted to say this thread feels like a really central and helpful group discussion, and it’s great to see this visioning around sudo, hackerspaces, and their relation between stuff and humans.
A meeting to discuss more sounds good and will do my best to be available, though I can’t yet confirm :/ Might it be possible to schedule a virtual meeting, which might make it easier for folks given short notice?
I also wanted to acknowledge that there are some deep feelings around this topic and so we should all make an extra hard effort to not take different views personally and to remember that everyone probably shares the same ultimate goal of how to make sudo more inviting and lively.
Imo it’s not so much about choosing between ‘empty yoga studio’ vs ‘hoarders paradise’ approaches as two opposing extremes, as much as deciding on what a reasonable balance is? by perhaps defining some minimal standards and routines.
Since standards decided upon can always be changed later, we might embrace new approaches like the experiment that they are, without them feeling too fraught or set in stone, a la the ‘RERO’ truism (release early, release often). By the same token the earlier hacker truism that seems far less in vogue these days, but I think particularly relevant to our approach here about structuring space, is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
Best,
David
I would like to discuss this in real-time, ideally face to face, for those available. Who can join me tomorrow (Monday) night at 8:30 pm?
There is a lot of talk about what policy changes should be made, and what Sudo *should not* be like. I think consensus works best when you go from current situation > future situation > goals/motives > plans > execution.
So, having more or less established that the current situation is not ideal, could we talk about what SudoRoom *should be* in the future? If people can agree on that, I think the policies might be more clear.
To me, a hackerspace is useful because it has a bunch of great people and tools and materials that I don’t have access to at my own home.
1) I can learn things from people, whether through casual interactions, shared projects, and/or organized classes
2) Sharing tools and space, and acquiring materials in bulk means everyone can have cheaper access overall
3) The community energy is inspiring and focusing. I want to do cool things when I’m hanging with people who do cool things.
4-?) ??? add your thing here
In terms of motives, goals, fears, etc:
If I understand correctly, Jake is saying that curating tools and materials is an important function of a Hackerspace — i.e. to enable (2) — and that doing so requires significant effort.
Again, if I understand correctly, Yar, Andrew, and others are saying that a cluttered space inhibits (1) and (3).
To add a fear of my own: materials (and to a lesser extent tools, which are often consumable — drill bits, grinding wheels, etc.) cost money/time, and are often not maintained/replaced when they’re shared.
It seems like the solution is to decide on a vision for what future SudoRoom should be like. If you show up at SudoRoom on any given day, what tools, materials, and people would you want to have access to? If we agree on that, the plan should be easier to come up with, and people will be more motivated to actually do it.
Eric
> On Feb 19, 2022, at 15:19, Jake via sudo-discuss <sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>
> 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@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
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