It’s one of the last things in his SOI thread. I linked to his comment (paraphrased) “I’m not surprised people threaten you, due to how you talk online.”
Words on a screen -> threats -> “not surprising”
That’s your candidate talking about being not surprised by behavior I was taught was wrong when I was in pre school.
Jim Hartnett talking to Kevin Patel
You came to me to try and get a key to the building saying you wanted to make PPE; you didn’t try and get a discussion going. That’s not even my call, I’m not on the board. So I’m surprised that I’m the person you chose to call out. Are you the one that gave Acme leadership my phone number to make those threatening calls by chance?
Kevin Patel talking to Jim Hartnett
You’re so damn paranoid just living in your everyone is trying to hack and destroy virtual world. You’ve lost touch with humans and reality. No ones trying to take down DMS via Google Groups? Hell no one really uses it. You’ve been going after me every since I mentioned your conflict of interest months ago and it’s just growing. That’s a retaliatory nature. Not surprised people have threatened you with the way you talk to people online.
Jim is accusatory of Kevin.
Jim is very adversarial online.
Is Jim accusing Kevin of making threatening phone calls? No
Is Kevin threatening Jim? No
It sounds like a remark said in frustration after feeling persecuted by Jim.
The whole thread is full of tit for tat. Jim is perpetuating that.
When people are put in to a position that they feel attacked, it can be easily seen that others might feel angry when they are attacked. When Jim accuses Kevin of giving out his phone number, that was a cheap shot and unfair because he is lumping Kevin together with the person on the phone. We only have Jim’s word on that phone call and what was said and more importantly how it was said.
Do I think Kevin was out of line for saying this? I think the whole thread is out of line.
Usual procedure is to STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS folks.
Well it was Carrollton, that is how I found the Space…
Retired now and doing great, thank you.
Todd
That was my fault. Not sorry. The space is a great place when you get to go work on your projects
No, you’re lecturing people about one-side. It’s disingenuous to try and present only your perspective to people, and hide the arguments and evidence presented by anyone else.
Things like youtube videos with comments disabled are the same way; it’s designed to seem like it’s the only option, the only source without any valid, meaningful discourse.
Gotta second this; with only a couple exceptions, most of the “adversarial” nature comes from people who don’t like it when their BS gets called out. They either dig in their heels and keep arguing it, or they run off and claim that the membership is mean to them because they can’t actually defend their argument. A prime example of this is a thread for a Digital Media minutes post, which was pointed out to be extremely outrageous in almost every sense of the word. Rather than try and justify the plan, or discuss things with the membership, the chair tried to shut down discussion because he had no defense for the lavish waste of funds they authorised and didn’t want to be held accountable to the membership: 2019.10.25 - Digital Media Meeting Minutes
(to onlookers, this is in fact one of the people running for the BoD… that tried to silence members from discussing his committees plans)
Every day we lose a number of members due to expiring cards. I spent a few hours putting this post together, and frankly I’m getting a little out of it so I’m gonna stop here and maybe tweak it tomorrow.
ah yes, the well-discredited, misleading graph with explicitly confusing axis and unrelated data, and your addition of a label “steady decline” that started well before this board and you conveniently leave off the rise leading up to COVID.
There’s no correlation in this decline with classes; there’s no correlation in this decline with revenue (on the contrary, our revenue is way up compared to the same quarter a year prior), nor does it correlate with honorarium payments. The start of that decline marks squarely with the rise in membership costs. And it’s funny, people keep saying we’re doomed right now but the numbers in the bank don’t lie: proper fiscal policies have placed us leaps and bounds over where we used to be, even with major expansion spending.
Even when choosing whether to ignore the fact that correlation != causation, these numbers completely ignore compounding factors and the actual evidence: the vast majority of cancellations (which remember, we can see what they list when cancelling directly) are related to moving, finances, and not-enough-time-to-visit and we lose a lot of members that simply have failed payments silently.
Your anecdotal, edge-case example of leaving because (and I’m quoting your cancellation here) “Bullshit board” is a far cry from the actual reasons people leave. Want to know how many cancellations have a mention of the board? In the history of our WHMCS records, going back years, the total count of cancellations that even mention the word “board” or “BOD” (excluding cases where it’s a partial match like a user moving to Cambodia) is exactly 8 (including yours). These go back years, including complaints against your buddy Kris Anderson by multiple members about their abuse of power and botching the expansion, and one where Thummel not being banned for threats of violence towards members was the core of the complaint (which we noted, he actually already had been banned when that complaint came in someone apparently misinformed that member).
The majority of members cancel for reasons outside control of the space. In a sample of one year of drop data, we looked at 369 cases from 2018 of actual cancellations.
of these 369 cases, only 19 are within the control of DMS, a rate of approximately 5%.
Whilst the dataset from the current year isn’t completely aggregated into a handy spreadsheet like a volunteer did in 2019 for the 2018 dataset, being on the recipients list of every cancellation I can say with certainty they’re all in the same boat. Moving, Finances, not enough time / not using the space, etc dwarf issues related to DMS politics. The only new biggie has been COVID during Spring of 2020.
FD: This is all back-of-the-envelope based on what I can reasonably pull from the billing system without a ton of coding custom API calls right now. It looks at cases where invoices were cancelled, and uses the number for those which were attempted to be charged but did not succeed so the account was suspended. These are undercounted by the mixing of combined add-on/primary invoices with the invoices where members are counted separately into an invoice for an add-on and a separate invoice for the primary.
This does not factor in members that rejoined at a later time; the point of this exercise is to show how common card-drops really are, and why it generally doesn’t make any damn sense to look at just membership numbers and magically, somehow, they’re caused by the current board.
From July 1st 2019 through February 29th, 2020 (I chose this range since the new board is established, and this ends before the COVID fears start setting in and doesn’t count the edge cases of the 2 weeks before COVID where we had a small spike and sudden cancellations based on local universities closing their makerspaces)
We had 571 members that had their invoices that entered cancelled status after being generated.
Of these, 140 were cancelled without any charge attempted. This means there were 140 cases of accounts for which they put in a cancellation request after the invoice was generated, or they removed their payment info directly (meaning the system did not attempt to charge it). These are shown in the screenshot as entries that do not have a “Last Charge Attempt” date and are deducted from this number
This makes for:
571 - 140 = 431 membership drops because of unpaid invoices (or about 75% of the drop incidents)
That right there is a sizable chunk of members, dropped during that timeframe because their payments on file did not go through.
Now how does that compare to other years? I’m glad you asked!
so in the same period the year prior (2018-2019) we had
514 - 131 = 383 drops due to lack of payment.
But wait, why is this year different??? that’s only a few percent difference in drop rate from lack of payment.
Excellent question. It boils down to new members coming in the door decreasing, whilst the drop rate remained largely unchanged. This can be seen in the following outputs from WHMCS (though please note, these are new members tracked in the graphs, whilst the second column of data is overall orders).
Well, there are a few reasons and it’s impossible to name a single one as responsible.
This has a very short answer: NO
And a modest explanation:
Despite the drop in new member signups, we have had a significant increase in overall financial status compared to last year when we had quite a few more members. How? Simply put, we’re not blowing money out the window.
tl;dr: we don’t allow frivilous waste like the table in the bottom of these minutes: https://dallasmakerspace.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Committee_Meeting_20191129
The sheer statement that we somehow have a massive exodus from the space this year is 100% bolognium.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk on what it means to have actual evidence, rather than just a bunch of BS spewn out because someone wants to be a concern troll.
and with that Goodnight, I already had to learn enough about the reporting functions in WHMCS, spent overly too long on this post, and I’m tired of dealing with this argument that somehow we’re making people leave because of some vague “this board” reasons like some would imply.
Regards,
-Jim Hartnett
Infrastructure Officer, The guy that reads every cancellation notice and knows most people leave because of moving/finances/not-enough-time.
I could take the time to counter that … blog post but there is no point in arguing with you Jim. It doesn’t matter what is said it will just result in more Tit for Tat. You told me once that you have a problem knowing when to stop.
But as a point interest can I have a copy of your data? I’d like to use it on https://makerspacedata.com
I’m totally interested in getting better representations.
Surely less time than watching a video that’s 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 37 seconds though 
yeah, those really need to be shorter … good point
In your graph you will notice the decline started with the last board!
And it kept going throughout this board!
This is literally what people are talking about when they say that you never answer anything concrete and just talk about nothing. Now’s your chance to show us there’s substance to your arguments.
Because we stopped giving out candy! 
Wait, no candy? This is bullshit!
I demand candy with my membership
Ps kidding kidding
I think the candy was the blue tape
From their own website: https://www.morebluetape.org/
Although our leadership has permitted a record number of bans, new rules, expenditure items, expansion approvals, etc., they have put far fewer items on the calendar than our former leadership. Our membership never seems to know what’s going on!
The BoD does not fill the calendar with anything other than scheduled meetings. It is people volunteering to teach that puts items on the calendar. If they were being honest you would say that due to reduced honorariums there have been fewer classes on the calendar. And due to COVID-19 there have been very few classes during the closure.
Our facility has doubled in size. Yet, our membership numbers have consistently declined since our last election
Our numbers have declined since the previous Board of Directors. There was a spike in membership in December 2018 due to rates going up. Then membership numbers started tapering off February 2019.
Our membership decline started well before anyone had heard of Convid-19
This is true but implies we know all the reasons membership dropped. We see the cancelation requests and most were due to moving, can no longer afford membership, going back to school, only 2-3 I can think of were due to board actions.
Even as DMS was closed for Covid-19, our leadership posted no agenda items on the schedule related to us closing our doors and allowed no community discussion. Most of our membership had no idea when DMS would re-open, even days before we finally reopened.
In this case we could have communicated the message better. But discussion would not have changed that we were forced to close DMS. Regarding re-opening, we were waiting on directions from state and local governments when we could re-open. They are the ones that was moving the target dates for certain types of activities. As we can see now there is evidence that some types of activities should have remained closed.
Using your own data at https://makerspacedata.com/Dallas-Makerspace/ you try to relate many pieces of info that are not clear indicators of “community” or “satisfaction” or “health”
Going down the list of charts -
Honorarium: you will see uncontrolled growth ad the end of the 2018-2019 Boards Term. While it was great to see so many classes it was unsustainable. At it’s peak it was 1/3 of DMS’s income!
Board Meetings: This only indicates how busy the board is. As we have grown so has the number of board meetings. There is a section regarding Special Meetings in our bylaws, go read it: https://dallasmakerspace.org/wiki/Bylaws#Section_2.4_Special_Meetings Stop implying they are against the rules, in case you missed it see link above.
Permanently Banned: Why only show permanently? I’m sure there were more temp bans but we don’t track that info. As the community grows this metric will grow too. It is just part of human nature that some do not follow the rules of our community.
Total Income: This is actually very useful. You can see that prior to the Covid-19 closure our income remained relatively stable.
Expenses: The prior board the expenses grew quite a lot. We can attribute the bulk of the rise due to honorarium growth and expansion costs. Notice under our term expenses have been reduced while continuing expansion. Honestly reduced honorarium is the majority factor.
Fixed Assets: Not sure how this number is derived but as you accumulate durable tools, equipment this number will pretty much grow over time.
Bank Accounts: While having money in the bank is very important. It is also related to how we spend that money that is more important.
Equity: Like assets, this is expected to grow over time.
Liabilities: This is a big one in terms of importance. What kind of financial exposure do we have? Looks like the last two boards have done a good job keeping this low.
Net Income: This is the big daddy to measure how successful we are as an ongoing concern. While there is a certain amount of seasonal variation (Nov-Dec are hard months). The 2018-201 board had a slow decline over their term but again that is most likely honorariums and expansion costs. Net Income has remained pretty steady in the last year even with Covid-19.
Stop being disingenuous and own up to that a lot of these attacks are political hack jobs. And even poorly done at that.
I think our membership is able to sniff our the BS. What are you going to do to support DMS in the next term?
Along with red Solo cups
Styrofoam coffee cups
Paper plates / bowls
Plastic utensils
I would also add: Oranges, Roasted Chicken, Wipes, Eggs & condiments. (Things we found in the expensify reports)
Not in mine 
DMS Austerity Program
