Jake,

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.

However, I think saying that people who don't like the space as it is should just go elsewhere is not good policy. 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


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.

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:

> Thank you Liz for chiming in and boy do I agree with your sentiments.
>
> Personally, I ruminated a lot this year that if what the community wants is
> limitless storage of potentially-useful items as perhaps Omni’s main
> de-facto function on a per-square-foot basis as the community’s shared
> storage garage.. then we might do far better to sell omni, get a much
> cheaper and bigger open-floorplan warehouse, fill it with pallet shelving,
> park a forklift in there, give folks access codes and probably have money
> left over to spare for other things.
>
> I do feel there is a certain point at which the aggregate inertia of piles
> and stuff can replace and reduce people in a space, when space imo should
> privilege people and activity over inert storage. Imo, stuff stored should
> ideally be driven by the ongoing needs of active projects and not much
> else. Masses or jumbles of undigested stuff that may or may not function in
> serious quantities, I think can discourage and intimidate ideation and
> engagement new projects. Whereas organized stuff - even if that means less
> stuff - feels more likely to spark engagement and actualization of why any
> of the stuff is there in the first place.
>
> David
>
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 22:04 Liz Henry via sudo-discuss <
> sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>
>> Hey, lizzard from Noisebridge here, just to say that no, we also have a
>> fairly horrible e-waste problem and not enough people are helping with it.
>> I want to get rid of the giant e-waste bin that we have because it fills
>> up, overflows, no one but me has dealt with it for months and we have like
>> shelves and shelves and giant piles of increasingly unloved broken stuff.
>>
>> I have been putting some of it out on the curb and paying junk haulers to
>> take it to e-waste. Trash warriors has been very helpful and seems like a
>> good company for this.
>>
>> But too much of it, we keep because someone thinks it may be an
>> interesting project for someone someday or have some value or they hate to
>> think of the waste. But it's so much work to move it out.  And every time I
>> do someone is upset about some part of it.
>>
>>  I'm just here to support being a little harsher on hoarding behaviors
>> because I believe we need to clear space --- physically and mentally ---
>> for new people and ideas and projects. We won't find out what those new
>> things will be, if the space is overdetermined into a giant nostalgia pile.
>> Make room for making!!!
>>
>>  Maybe there's also a place in our world for a giant warehouse full of
>> weird electronic scrap!!! Like urban ore but for hacker space folks.  But
>> that isn't what I want the primary purpose of noisebridge to be....
>>
>> My 2 cents.
>>
>> Lizzard
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022, 4:13 PM Joule Munic via sudo-discuss <
>> sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Yar: I think a lot of it just comes from random people who see sudo room
>>> as a place to “donate” electronics that they no longer need.
>>>
>>> I suspect the laser came from a Berkeley lab. I didn’t know it was
>>> dangerous as I was raised to believe UV-A just tans the skin but according
>>> to this 2020 study no, it was found to be profoundly mutagenic.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Noisebridge had this e waste problem for a while until they made a
>>> dedicated spot for e waste which gets regularly emptied —I don’t know by
>>> whom.
>>>
>>> Presently we have about 5-8 cubic meters of stuff that piled up and
>>> should be removed…
>>>
>>> -J
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Feb 18, 2022, at 3:21 PM, Jake via sudo-discuss <
>>> sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'm not in agreement that sudoroom's interaction with e-waste equals
>>> cancer,
>>>> but I'm very sorry that you're having to deal with a skin tumor, i'm
>>> sure
>>>> that's very stressful.
>>>>
>>>> As for the e-waste at sudoroom, I'm planning to do an e-waste run after
>>> a
>>>> session of sorting with another sudoer, within the next two weeks.
>>>>
>>>> I did recently help fix and sell the fridge and earned sudoroom $210
>>> while
>>>> clearing up some space.  I have also been putting hours of work into
>>> sorting
>>>> ewaste and moving things along and out of the space, every tuesday
>>> night.
>>>>
>>>> -jake
>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, 18 Feb 2022, Yardena Cohen via sudo-discuss wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 2:55 PM Joule Munic via sudo-discuss <
>>> sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>>>>>> I'm no longer strong enough to keep cleaning up, and some of the
>>> e-waste
>>>>>> that shows up is genuinely dangerous, like a UV laser that appears to
>>> have
>>>>>> given me vascular tumors.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Appear benign, but, punching a hole in my genome has really kicked my
>>>>>> survival instinct into high gear and I don't want anything to do with
>>>>>> e-waste anymore.
>>>>>
>>>>> Holy shit, I'm so sorry. That is awful and I don't blame you for
>>> stepping
>>>>> back after something like that.
>>>>>
>>>>> Where is all this stuff coming from?
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