A question for long term DMS members

DMS General
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I could use the perspective of members who have been with DMS for the majority of the life of the organization. As I understand it, DMS began with a 100 or so members with high participation and engagement of the members. Differing methods were used to keep members apprised of newsworthy activity as DMS grew until the Talk platform became the communication tool of choice.

My guess is that you started with very high engagement in changes. Would it be fair to say 8 or 9 if every 10 members were reasonably up to date on status when things started? Then as DMS grew, it became harder to keep everybody up to date and the awareness slipped to maybe 7 of 10 or maybe 5 of 10. Today, if visiting Talk can be associated with staying up to date, DMS is approaching 1 in 4 are able to stay current with news.

So, here’s the question (and yes, I realize it is just your subjective opinion), but where would you say DMS was in the sweet spot of healthy growth and members having a good level of awareness of news about DMS ?

Would you say 6 out of every 10 members were staying on top of news? 5 of 10?
4 of 10? Even less?

Thanks in advance for sharing your perspective.

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Don’t forget, in that time the range and number of tools has grown enormously. I have not been around that long, but I estimate that keeping up with just a couple of committees is more work than keeping up with all of DMS in the 100 member era.

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Before the days of talk DMS used google groups. While Google groups could be configured it sent out notifications/emails on a majority of topics. Towards the end of the life it was over 1k emails a months (I can likely find some charts when I get off mobile) Andrew Lecody took this and spent a great deal of time looking for options and settled on Discord. The requirements were:

Something that was public so that DMS could show what they are going through to assist other Makerspace’s.

Something to support and allow future growth where committees could communicate with it’s members and attract new members and finally way to reduce emails (important to note majority of the committees had there own email DL)

To answer your question about news personally I think it could be improved specifically two items

Planning
Transparency

(I will add more tomorrow)

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Over the years (been a member since October 2010) we have used pretty much every communication medium available. Early on it was IRC and the Wiki, later we tried several Google Groups (machine shop’s is still up). Did a lot of Google Hangouts, a member started Flickr account. And eventually our Facebook page.

TALK (Discourse) is relatively new but so far has had the most reach in one place. I would agree it is not ideal for reaching out to a whole committee. But remember some people don’t want to participate regardless of the platform. And even if you made it required many would not join.

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@Lampy … what I am curious about is just your impression … when were things running well given the desire for growth and members generally knowing what was up … half were reasonably current? More? Less?

Not an inquiry about platforms and methods … just looking for your gut feel about member experience when it seemed to work pretty smoothly because enough folk by whatever method were able to stay on the same page?

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Well when I joined DMS was around 45 members. It was possible to actually know everyone. Even then we had about 50% that didn’t participate in online functions and less than 5% at the space any given time. I remember Mondays/Tuesdays during the day being the only person at the space until about 4pm.

We even tried to have co-working days in our tiny meeting room. The internet was barely 1-2mb and could not handle 3-4 people working online at once.

Member meetings were well attended and everyone knew what was going on. Still had contentious issues but it was pretty moderate. Much of the making howere was about DMS itself. We were certainly experimental in trying things out. Probably have much more friction in testing things out today.

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Let me caveat this, everyone that attended the member meeting knew what was going on. It was very easy back in the days of below 100 to think you were talking to all of DMS when you stood in front of a group of 10 to 15 people at the space.

I also joined near the time that Ken joined and I had attended multiple gathering over about 2 months before joining the group. When the group was this small, if you were active you knew everyone else that was active. When I say active, I mean using the physical space on a regular basis. At 50 members, I would say we were already below 50% tracking the monthly sausage making news of the group. Many tracked the advertising successes and growth, but the decisions and consideration of running the space where made by a very small group maybe 10 to 20. For my first year, you could have a major decision of the group passed in a member meeting by 8 votes for. This has actually changed very slowly over the years.

Looking back, we have never had better communication than we have now.
To break it down,

First communication platform, IRC, This was just a chat room that 8 people were in 24/7 it seemed. Almost no one followed the discussion beyond hey hows it going. If you weren’t watching the IRC when something was said, you missed it.

Wiki, This was never a two way platform and mainly served a historic record of the group and still does.

Email List, this was one way notifications. Had many issues with being auto flagged or manually flagged as spam.

Google groups, completely awesome in their ability to be two way communication, supported multiple follow-able conversations, and it was easy enough to come back and read after the fact. But, the notifications where crazy by default setup and we battled constant black listing and members who were looking for info not knowing it was there. Plus, the setup was clunky in use. But, still good considering the time.

Then came TALK and we had a leap forward in communication. The little community and friends discussions that ticked off the antisocial among us were easy to ignore without hitting the group with black lists and BS. It was very intuitive to jump into and know how it worked. It looked PROFESSIONAL! It wasn’t anywhere as clunky as the other forum software being used by most other groups. Plus, we could afford it. Because of this we grew faster than we would of without it. People outside our group would actively follow the discussions and projects of our space. Because of this we ran away from the makerspaces our size at the time and started making up major ground on the bigger spaces. TALK was a big move, but a quiet one at the start.

Other big moves of the DMS in order. First 24/7 facility, First laser, First 3d printer, First DMS owned laser, First Hackathon, Expansion to second space, honorariums, committees, Monetary space, Wood Shop investment, Laser investment, Creative Arts growth to a power house, All committees investment increased and committee trust increased. We are now at today, I hope we can call fixing the plans for the expansion a huge success and allow our committees to grow and both number and size with the extra space.

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FYI, there are 10 of us in IRC now. One of them is nach00! :wink: Join us http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=dallasmakerspace

Yep, made it very hard to participate!

The rest is a good rundown of our history.

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Discourse* AKA Talk

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More members changes things but I feel like the leadership changes things more than the number of members. Information went from being assumed to be public to tightly controlled. Things that used to be discussed openly by anyone and shared publicly could suddenly lead to a ban for sharing. This hugely discourages participation because people assume they need permission when they really don’t.

Members used to be able to contribute in meaningful ways with great autonomy. Now even small changes require committee votes. Chairpersons have gone from highly motivated benevolent dictators to cat herders that tally votes. It takes longer to do things and the options for what’s possible have significantly narrowed. Votes at the committee level used to be very rare and were seen as a courtesy.

It seems we’ve gone from open mindedness and optimism to closed mindedness and cynicism. Now we have to vote on every little thing and the assumption is that’s better because everyone has a say. I’ve seen it both ways and I can assure you it’s not better. I think it’s why there’s tons of stuff broken and missing and nothing is being done about it. Go into the workshop and try to find a usable set of drill bits. I used to bring a lot of my own tools to the space five years ago. It got to where I didn’t have to do that because shit was together. Now it’s back to me bringing my own tools again because you never know what you’re going to get (or not get) from the toolbox. That sucks.

Committee chairperson elections are a popularity contest which doesn’t help anyone. Appoint qualified and motivated people to positions where they can have an impact. Give them autonomy. Enable them to do a good job. Get them a credit card. Make people feel like they can contribute in meaningful ways without the fear of getting banned. If someone is doing a terrible job and isn’t learning from their mistakes then give them the boot and appoint someone else. There are no terms for chairpersons so they can be changed anytime. The board should be appointing people that will be beneficial for the organization. The board of directors ins’t there to run committee elections.

A lot of the things I’m saying have been codified by others. For example Netflix.

  • encourage independent decision-making by employees
  • share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
  • are extraordinarily candid with each other
  • keep only our highly effective people
  • avoid rules

They talk about some of the downsides like the fact that it’s not for everybody. Some folks aren’t cut out for it and can’t keep up with the competitive environment. The assumption we have as members is everyone is equal and anyone could step up into any position and it would be great. That isn’t reality and I think we need to come to terms with that. There are folks in the community that would make great leaders and chairpersons and there are folks that would be absolutely terrible at it. Let’s focus on how we can get the folks that would make great leaders and chairpersons to run the place. Everyone benefits from that.

As a direct answer to your question, I don’t think the issue is awareness of what’s going on (though that could be improved). The issue is deeper than that. I think the sweet spot was when we had enough money to cover things important to the members but we also had the common sense to enable the best performing people run the place. Now we’ve got more money than sense which is the opposite problem from what we’ve had in the past.

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Very interesting post. Followup question about committees. Did “committees run things” become a thing after the benevolent dictator era went away or has that been a concept for a longer time frame?

And from whenever “committees run things” became the business model, where is the BoD role in this? I know they authorize the Chairs after committee elections and can apparently reject a winning candidate or even remove one later down the road. Is this sorta like the BoD is the holding company and the committees are subsidiary “businesses” (to take a model from the business world) or is it something very different?

In browsing the Wiki, I see some dated reports of Member Meeting where departments appear to have made reports, etc. Haven’t been to anything like that in my 13-14 months, so maybe I missed them or don’t they happen anymore? All the BoD meeting I’ve followed have been agenda specific actions and no platforms for what is a committee doing, is it in sync with some vision or goal, is it the best way for DMS in general, etc, etc.

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That would solve a lot of problems, but reduce the membership substanially.

The challenge of a volunteer run makerspace is a simple equation, the time spent on DMS activites reduces the time available to work on one’s own projects. Many of the improvement suggested, needed or anticipated are trading one’s project time for the good of the organization.

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If we believed the world should run solely on meritocracy, there wouldn’t be a Dallas Makerspace. We are about empowering anyone to create, learn - and yes, to lead.

Also…real talk, that summary doesn’t really make Netflix sound like a good place to work. I definitely wouldn’t pay $50/mo to be there.

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The idea that committees run most things and the BOD looks after large expenditures and rule changes has been part of our organizing philosophy from very early on; basically ever since we’ve had committees to speak of.

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Ok, thanks.

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I have noticed a few things while keeping a tally on this committee election. Very very few committees have more than one candidate running. Many of them run because no one else will do it. Netflix pays people, we couldn’t afford to do that. We still end up putting quite a bit on our chairs with no pay and especially if we go back to the benevolent dictator model This is the reason that we need strong committees. This is to spread the load. The chair should be the organizer of the committee. The one that can set meeting times and make sure proper procedure is carried out. But the majority of the work should be done by committee members They should be free enough to come up with ideas and be heard. They can then lead that project under the committee. I think committees could then create job positions, that later can be filled by someone else. If we decided to go back to just the chair doing it all or voluntelling people to do something. I think you will find that you won’t get alot done or perhaps you might but then get burn-out. The idea with volunteers is to spread the load in a structured way instead of having a dictator.

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I assumed Luke was just contrasting the concept of a for profit entity only as an extreme that could be used in a thought process toward encouraging subject matter experience over popularity for leadership roles. As Haley added, DMS would want to sponser opportunity to become a leader as well. In a perfect world you might have “eager learners” work up through other roles before becoming a Chair.

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Instead of the Netflix model … what about the Valve model?

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Never make the part 3 of anything?

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hahaha … yup

Actually, it is really hard to top previous games sometimes. You have to come up with something original enough and doesn’t make the players go WTF… 2 was better.

But we are off-topic