Honorarium Rules - Effective 12/15/2017

At the recent December Board meeting, the following rules were adopted with respect to Honorariums:

Honorarium Rules

Honorariums are paid by the Dallas Makerspace to promote structured education about making. These rules are intended to encourage teaching topics which directly relate to making, including learning tools, software, methods, and techniques needed to make something. Honorariums are not intended to encourage the teaching of classes which have nothing to do with making, including subjects which are better learned through public schools or institutions of higher learning. Members may teach non-making classes, however these classes will not be eligible for honorarium.

Requirements

  1. Persons wishing to collect honorariums for classes must provide a fully completed and signed W9 to DMS prior to receipt of any honorarium, without exception.

  2. To be approved for honorarium, a class must be submitted at least 240 hours prior to the beginning of the event.

  3. All classes are subject to scrutiny especially where subject matter is vague, potentially unrelated to making, or instruction time is less than 90 minutes to ensure quality of material and value to the DMS and members.

  4. Instructors must provide a syllabus or detailed outline of the class to be eligible.

  5. If an instructor donates his/her portion of the Honorarium to a Committee, then a W9 shall not be required.

  6. Only a single honorarium may be paid for any class.

  7. Honorarium can be forgone by the hosting member and designated to a committee

  8. Honorarium Auditors cannot discuss their own honorarium requests except through channels available to non-Honorarium Auditor.

  9. For all honorarium classes 3 attendees are required to receive honorarium.

  10. Honorarium auditors have the responsibility for enforcing these rules, however, their judgements may be appealed to the Board of Directors at the next available meeting.

Please note - Classes which require playing a version of “six degrees to Kevin Bacon” in order to make them relevant to making, are not classes about making. The operative words here, are “Directly relate to making”.

Non-Makery classes are still allowed. Enjoy and have fun. But we won’t pay you to teach them.

Please define “Non-Makery” vs “Makery” as this is not clear and if one follows Wikipedia this prevents honorarium classes for Digital Media, Software Dev, VCC, Science, and VECTOR.

Plus restricts IoT, Electronics, RC, and Robotics types courses to only arduino based classes.

Re #4 detailed outline/syllabus

Are the details of what the class will be covering fine in the description or is this something additional?

[edit to add]
It seems like the simplest is making sure the description is detailed enough to give clarity of what is being covered, skills learned, etc which would aid auditors approving classes and potential students considering registering

Adding an attachment is more problematic (occasionally has glitched in past) and in the body of description, everything is there at a glance. The exception being lengthy information of course that would be better as attachment

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I have questions about this as well
For a hands on class, is a basic description enough

ie We will be learning how to prepare and soak materials to make
a classic egg basket?

Clarification here please. Does this mean 3 attendees regardless of how many have signed up, even if they are different people? - Like walk ins.

  • If so, what is the procedure for listing attendees that are not already listed on the Calendar Attendee list?

I always leave registration open until 30 min after class start, that way those folsk can
still register

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Does the class handout/outline/syllabus need to be uploaded to the calendar page when submitted? Or do we just paste it into the description?

Back when I was a member of the Board and when we manually approved classes, I personally wanted to see the underpinnings of a good class - student materials, a lesson plan, and anything else that backed the proposal as a serious class.

Once we transitioned to the present system and Board Members became de facto Honorarium Auditors, I still looked for the same things when perusing pending classes.

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It depends on the class, and how comfortable the auditors are with the teacher and material. I think the thing to remember, is that honorarium is intended to incentivize good teaching and quality classes about making. Honorarium is not wages. So each teacher should try to offer the best class they can. Being well organized, by creating a syllabus for your class, is one of the first things all teachers are taught, everywhere teachers are taught.

That being said, syllabuses are easy when teaching hands-on classes, but far less so, the farther away from making a class gets. A class with no demonstrations, no hands-on learning, and only a person talking for a hour about whatever, is very likely to be a poor quality class - hence attracting the attention of the auditors.

That being said, I would likely offer you up as a good example, since I know most of your classes are very hands-on indeed. So I doubt they would expect a rigorous syllabus in your case, and a good description will likely be enough.

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Are the classes hands-on? Involve demonstrations? Or, does justifying them require a lot of explaining or specious argument? Not that hard to figure out, really.

Please understand - we never intended honorarium to be a way for people to make money. The honorarium is a way to incentivise instruction about making things, so that our members, who joined DMS to make, and to learn how to make, receive a direct benefit from the expenditure of funds.

So long as there is adequate time and space available, we allow members to teach classes or hold events which aren’t maker related. But it would be a poor decision to spend our very limited money on activities which have nothing to do with making.

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