There have been too many replies in this topic to address them individually, thus I will simply respond in general with the following.
Background
The Dallas Maker Space is a 501©(3) non-profit organized under the educational purpose in the tax code; as such our activities and policies should support this purpose. We also are granted tax-exempt status because we provide this educational mission to the larger community outside of our membership.
Education at DMS occurs in 3 general ways:
- Structured classes under our honorarium process that teach to an objective
- Structured events outside of our honorarium process that typically perform some form of practical exercise
- Non-structured learning at DMS via use of our facilities and resources to self-teach, perfect, and maintain skills
We prioritize access to the facility in that very same order. Because you must be a member to access the facility for the 3rd form of learning, it is the least priority.
We limit access to classes, events, and equipment under numerous conditions that we presume to be reasonable – members only for dangerous power equipment (without which DMS might face legal liabilities and because we have to fund our operations in order to sustain the organization), requires prerequisite or demonstrated competency for reasons of safety or foundational skill, participant must provide tools or materials, provide fees to DMS to cover consumables or equipment depreciation, etc.
On an organizational level, DMS is not what it was 6 months, a year, 2 years ago, etc. We presently occupy a space roughly triple in size what Ladybird was, have about quadruple the membership, and our structured educational offerings have grown nearly exponentially from a handful of times a month to dozens of times per month. We simply cannot operate the way we did in the past – resources are sufficiently scarce and we’re large enough to attract increasing regulatory scrutiny.
I remain opposed to reserving work areas or tools (hereafter referred to as private events) because it is the sensible, responsible way to administer DMS. Allowing private events is inefficient, contradicts our principle as a community workshop, and I believe it constitutes private inurement.
Efficiency
Allowing private events is a waste of our resources.
Resources that could benefit other members or the community at large are instead dedicated to a single individual and perhaps their invited friends. If private events become commonplace, resources might be blocked out for an increasing percentage of the time because someone wants to production-line a bedroom set, completely rebuild their automobile, consume the entire workshop in order to perform final assembly on an experimental aircraft, or the common room all weekend for a LAN party, or any other imaginable scenario.
Private events can also prevent legitimate structured events from occurring because they are occupying the resource for an individual and their select friends during a time when an actual structured event might occur.
Both of these scenarios could significantly hurt DMS’s ability to attract and retain members in the short term and threaten our survival in the long term.
I’ve heard multiple people describe the failures of a reservation system that 3D fab experimented with in the past. No-shows and late arrivals were common during reservation windows, with the latter causing tension when they ran into the next window – reserved or otherwise. The printers would sit idle for hours while people actually in the building waited for no reason.
A Community Workshop
Allowing private events violates the first-come-first-serve principle that’s embedded in our culture.
Private events deny others the ability to use resources that also made the effort to come to DMS. Most of us come here to do more than just knock out a project by working in a space for X hours nonstop without anyone else around; far from it – the surprise interactions are socially rewarding, result in unexpected learning, and enrich us all.
If private events become commonplace, this community would be threatened if not beaten down severely. One can envision resources booked defensively much of the time just to ensure availability for single people. Conversely, if you need to make some furniture and the tablesaw is booked all hours between 6 AM and midnight for the next two weeks, why bother showing up?
Private Inurement
Allowing private events confers a benefit on whoever booked the event.
Under the first-come-first-serve principle of a community work shop, everyone has roughly equal access to our resources. This informal system generally works out that we can use the tools we need.
A private event confers exclusive access to resources, something not normally available in a community workshop. If you don’t think this is valued in the market, I suggest trying to rent a workspace and populate it with tools for the cost of that time period’s membership dues. I believe that you will find such exclusivity is worth a staggeringly large multiple of what membership dues cost at DMS.
Complimentary to this exclusive access is that you are denying other members access to said resources and potentially diverting DMS resources from its educational mission.
While the common examples of private inurement do center around embezzlement, money-laundering, and classic conflicts of interest by non-profit managers and employees, these are not the limits of the definition. Guidance on the subject instead defines actions of “insiders” who are simply related to the organization in any way and can influence it to their benefit at the detriment of its mission.
Some concerns have been expressed about some members profiting from the work they do at DMS. While this is of legal concern for a non-profit such as DMS, our stance is that it is incidental to the nature of our mission and tracking it would represent an onerous administrative overhead. To a regulator, private events to reserve resources can certainly look like for-profit production: students or hobbyists generally have flexible schedules and benefit from collaboration with one another. Records of these events in the past and into the future will demonstrate that we do indeed have a reasonable ability to track and prohibit for-profit use of our resources.
The Solution
DMS should not allow private events. Allowing private events has far more downsides to how DMS functions than prohibiting them. Almost all actual and hypothetical examples of private events were either inappropriate for our mission or can occur quite smoothly without exclusive access to DMS resources. We can also prohibit private events without exhaustive definitions of what constitutes structured events vs private events.
