The next Operations & Facilities Meeting will be held on Thursday, April 2nd at 6pm. As with our previous meetings it will be held via google hangout chat.
If you would like to join the Operations Committee and help us manage the day-to-day stuff like HVAC, toilet repairs, networking/servers, electrical, project storage, etc, please let me know.
Meeting has been rescheduled to Thursday due to a scheduling conflict.
I think everyone may want to see the transcript from this meetingā¦ it was extremely obnoxious and definitely shows everyoneās true personality. Click here to see the transcript.
Wonāt open on my phone. Says incorrect document type.
Nevermind. Works only if I open via dropbox, though.
Hereās the same thing on PasteBin for those that like plain-text
To summarize, there is currently no undisputed agreement in Ops on who the committee should recommend to be the chair
Nice to have details about the potential cleaning crews, though. I was seriously about to float a āHow to TPā project idea to Ops that involved installing professional grade signage outlining basic bathroom maintenance steps, including the location of bulk consumables for restocking.
So Iāll just be over here thenā¦
I like this run down of the meeting, Iād add the idea Allen had about the Saturday meeting at noon for grievances to be heard. It was particularly hard to follow. Being on the side of the in person single account, simple conversations in the room would mess up tracking the conversation. Plus, sending your comment 4 plus comments late didnāt help either. Text chat for a meeting that requires back and forth from multiple people is much to hard, let alone trying to have 5 people communicating with 1 keyboard.
Iām guessing that āRoberts Rules of Orderā isnāt popular here, but I would pity the secretary who is supposed to be recording all this stuff in official minutes. The meeting needed to separate general discussion from voting, but even general discussion needs to be done in turns.
- Andrew wants to stay as chair and get others to just volunteer more under him.
I understand what you mean by Andrew wants to stay as chair. What does āget others to just volunteer more under himā mean? Andrew wants more people to join the space and volunteer? That sounds great! I agree, we need more volunteers at the space and I encourage this behavior!
- Allen Wan wants to replace Andrew as Ops committee chair while promising a more open / transparent running of committee.
Great, Allen Wan can join the committee, and even go for the chair position. I do find it odd that Allen would attempt to join the committee and become the committee chair in one fell swoop without even updating the wiki to reflect him even joining the committee. But how can you, in the same sentence, claim Allen wants a more ātransparentā committee when Nick is running around the building trying to recruit members to vote in his favor? I saw this with my own eyes; Robert saw this and it is recorded in the postbin on line 448/449. This is neither transparent nor excellent.
- Both are running for board and since the board has final say on appointing chairs it seems likely makeup of new board will have an impact on who is ops chair
I believe the board is required to approve committee chairs, but this doesnāt excuse what happened here, and has no relevance to what happened tonight. Why were people that are not part of operations pulled in during the meeting in an attempt to make Allen the committee chair by stacking the vote?
Again, this is not transparent nor excellent.
- Holding a meeting with half of the people online and half in person proxying through one account is not a good idea
Per the the committeeās own documentation 15 members were part of the committee during the meeting. 9 of which were present in the chat, and a 10th supposedly present via proxy.
Once again ā for the third time ā this is not excellent, nothing that happened was excellent.
Whatās worse, Line 684 Nick claims he was not out āgetting votesā. This is a lie, both Robert and myself saw him doing this. Nick blatantly lied.
My opinion has always been that a small group runs the space. You can go
back to all votes for years and see the number of people that truly vote.
Nick has ask from the beginning at the old space to be part of ops but was
denied, being stated we didnāt need anymore ops member (go back to the
pinpall issue). Allen puts a lot into the space and his views should be
looked at too. As far as ops, I would have wanted to learn more about
networking, cameras, and operations type stuff but knew it was no point in
asking (I even took the Cisco class until the mill came) because of talk at
the old space about ops not needing anymore help. So does ops have classes?
I was not present for the meeting either physically or online. In fact Iāve been removed from the space due to constraints on my free time for quite a while so understand that I may not be possessed of all the facts.
What I do have is a tremendous amount of respect for this organization, its intended purpose, and what has been accomplished of it and through it since we started this. I also have the transcript of the meeting posted by Brooks. And reading through the entire thing I can only express disappointment with the way this meeting/vote was conducted.
We have clear rules that define how committee voting works. And to be clear, it is not by general popularity. Voting within a committee with regard to the chair is intended to produce a recommended candidate to the board who make the final decision. So asking members outside of Ops whom they would like to vote for is at its least a waste of time and effort for little/no effect. At its worst it is deceptive toward all members of the space and in clear contempt of our agreed upon methods for making organized decisions. Both are absolutely not qualities becoming of a good leader.
I also agree with the idea that speaking through other membersā accounts in a group chat is just a bad idea. Joining a group hangout is not a difficult thing to do. Understanding how to use the tools necessary to participate in a discussion that you are not present for is the responsibility of individual members. Learn to do so, or donāt, but donāt hold your willful ignorance up as an example to the rest of us of just how opaque a process is. If transparency is the goal then demonstrate that by making every attempt to participate in discussions you feel you should be a part of in a transparent manner.
The situation appears to be thus: A member of the Ops committee and a non-member spoke through a single account in a meeting intended to determine the committees chair recommendation to the board. They attempted to speak for multiple other non-committee members through the account, and produced unverifiable votes for those members in a meeting that said members had no direct voting rights in regardless.
What should we make of these actions? Was this simply ignorance of how committee voting works? Was it intentional to draw attention to a political agenda? Or was it just a mistake made based on frustration with a perceived issue?
None of those possibilities instill any confidence in me that these are persons I want to hand decision making rights to on my behalf.
Michael,
I have ALWAYS been happy to explain how our network is set up. As far as teaching classes, thatās not really one of our goals. We try to keep the space running, stocked with supplies, etc. - not so much educating on how to keep a space running.
Back to joining Opsā¦ I have never seen anyone denied from joining Ops in my time being at the space. Nick asked if he could join a few months ago and Andrew added him to our distribution list without fuss. If Allen had asked to join Ops and was rejected, Iām guessing it would have been because he doesnāt have a stable email address that we can add to the distribution list.
A more useful conversation would be what is the role / expectations of ops chair? Why would someone want to be in that position? Should the opinion of non ops members matter? Ops is a committee unlike any other and really impacts everyone at the space regardless of if they volunteer to help restock / maintain the space.
Well, there was enough of āNot Excellentā to go around.
Preceding the Ops meeting, I was hosting my own committee meeting in electronics. William & Nick left my meeting to participate in Ops. I asked Nick to call me when it was time to vote. He came and got me, I ran down the hall and voted. I voted not knowing that I was not listed on the wiki. Other than the vote I did not participate in the discussion since I had to get back to running our meeting. In hindsight, it was probably not excellent to pop in to just to vote.
I thought I sent a request to [email protected] to join back when when had the conference about Bio on Feb 25th. Maybe it went into spam or Iām not remembering it correctly.
After reading the discussion afterwards there was pretty shocking behavior on all sides.
The question is does ops want to be inclusive or not? It is obvious that a mixed in person and online chat meeting has challenges. Especially when several people are participating through one account. To participate we should all be logged in via our our accounts. And how do we join the google hangout in the future? I saw at least 4 Google+ sites:
So at this point I would like to request to be a member of Ops. My first action as an ops volunteer is to get toilet paper holder(s) in the mens bathroom across for the Fortress of Solitude. 
A more useful conversation would be what is the role / expectations of ops chair? Why would someone want to be in that position?
This is a pretty valid question. Iām not exactly sure I know what the role is, nor why someone would want to be in charge of ops. But pretending like nothing happened yesterday is not a good idea. There are obviously issues that need to be addressed and people passionate about those issues. However, trying to stack a vote is no way to get anything done besides usurp power.
Should the opinion of non ops members matter?
If this was about other peopleās opinion, Nick wouldnāt attempt to stack the vote in his own favor. This is about justifying their own opinions and pretending to have the support by stacking the vote.
Ops is a committee unlike any other and really impacts everyone at the space regardless of if they volunteer to help restock / maintain the space.
While the Ops committee is integral to the smooth running of the space, that does not justify what took place yesterday. The ends do not justify the means.
One committee updated their wiki to show that members MUST be part of the committee prior to voting. These tactics have far reaching implications.
Has a date been picked for the next Ops Committee Meeting?
Hi Bryan (@bryan4tw)ā¦ Being a member of a committee to vote in committee matters has always been the case, as far as I know. I added the verbiage that you noted as a clarification - in an effort to minimize any confusion in the matter. Iām not sure I understand what you are trying to say the issue is with the clarification I added. Also, as a side note: I will be making a LOT of changes to the main 3D Fab wiki page, as itās pretty out of date. Iāll make a post in the 3D Fab category once itās been clean up. Thanks! 
Hi Ken (@Lampy)ā¦
I noticed this post, so did a search through messages sent to [email protected] for any messages received by you. I do see one message from you on Feb 25th; but, there was no mention of wanting to join Ops. I also checked the āpending messagesā via the group interface to see if any messages were caught up as āspamā; but, there were no pending messages. I do see a message from you today, though.
I just checked the wiki, and I donāt see you listed as a member yet. Perhaps it timed out as you were trying to āsaveā the change or something? Go ahead and add yourself again, please. Hereās the link: Operations and Facilities Committee - Dallas Makerspace
As for joining the Hangouts, we use the Google Hangouts chat (not the Google+ streaming hangoutsā¦). All you have to do to ājoinā a meeting, is ask (here, PM, e-mail, etcā¦) to be added. For members who donāt have a regular Gmail account, itās real easy to create an account (and itās FREE).
I hope this helps clear things up some.