So – many of us really, really want DMS to open. OTOH, we would (mostly) also want to be safe. Ish…
First question – do we have enough quality cleaning supplies to effectively clean the Space? Or – can we acquire those supplies? @mrjimmy – is that a question you could answer?
Presently I would not recommend re-opening.
I have a “vision”, which involves those who are hot to reopen doing all the work, but first there have to be supplies. And, yes, I will be at the front of the line to do the necessary work.
Metering admissions – we don’t turn on the RFID. One door only open, and a person keeping track.
Places that are open right this minute are just using guidelines for social distancing, and they are not enforcing. The Walmart by HMart had it set up so that aisles were one-way. I seemed to be the only shopper who noticed.
Now the availability of supplies – that is, indeed, a critical point. If we can’t clean, then we probably should wait.
The “you must be admitted by one person” could go a long way to enforcing PPE. I could dip into my fabric stash and make masks for all. (If anybody needs more fabric for mask-making, let me know.)
Who’s going to be the ‘person’ on a 24/7 basis to monitor the door?
Opening while any kind of capacity limitations are in place is going to be a problem for us- probably one that makes reopening under those restrictions infeasible.
We’ll set up a team from the folks that seriously want the Space to reopen. Ya’ don’t help – ya’ probably don’t get in. That specifically will need some work and fine-tuning as to details. And, who can we trust, etc. etc.
Certainly we can’t run the way we’ve been running. I am trying to think of practical ways that we might get a modicum of usability.
Conceptually, I agree with your thinking. Personally, I think more concrete and specific thinking is needed for the board to consider moving forward.
For example: if it was feasible to make the technology work, I could see setting up a certain number of two hour blocks per area on the calendar. A member ‘registers’ for a time slot and that is when they can come up to the space in that area. Once the slots are taken, no one else can register to be in that area. When the member arrives, their Token is authorized to admit them through one door. When they leave, they badge out to ensure capacity limits are maintained. If the member fails to badge out, stays longer than allowed or doesn’t cleanup before they leave, they are barred from entering until the space fully reopens.
I’m sure there are many challenges with implementing this approach, but attempting to be more specific…
That’s an interesting concept, although it would require a lot of programming to make it work. My programming skills are much too old to work with our system, so I’m working on a more heavily volunteer-dependent plan.
I’m not thinking so much theoretically, but practical what-can-I-do things.
I’ll admit it sucks, but why not?
Well, we’ll eventually get back to our normal mode, but it doesn’t lend itself to any sort of monitoring, and we KNOW we can’t trust everybody to follow rules.
Ahh, misunderstanding. I thought you were asserting that we had to open while restrictions are still in place.
I agree though, if we were to open while there are restrictions, we would not be able to run like normal.
So what is the capacity of DMS according to the fire marshal ?
The place is usually sparsely populated under normal conditions.
Classes might not work for a while, but other than that.
I think we need to start with an accountabilty framwork and controls to meet the legal/regulatory concerns the board rightfully has. We have to come up with something as bulletproof as possible to mitigate risk. As mentioned above, I think we have to assume rules won’t be followed without active enforcement.
Personally and at the current time I don’t see how volunteers can provide this. The space would likely need to employe a resource or two to effectively manage it. I have no idea what all this might entail, or if it is financially feasible.
One thought on capacity; I think the fire marshal capacity is good to know but will likely be irrelevant. We can’t have 25% of capacity all in one area like the woodshop. To mitigate risk I believe we will need a mechanism to limit capacity by area and then within the aggregate capacity.
Per our official Certificate of Occupancy with the City of Carrollton, our Occupancy Load is 356 people. So, 25% of that number is 89 people. Keep in mind that the Governor just allowed Libraries and Museums to open up on May 1st with the exception that any interactive areas are to be closed. Heck, everything at DMS is interactive! The Board of Directors have these numbers, let them decide.
Microcenter is using waitwhile.com to track and limit the number of people coming in. I can see that workflow working out for us:
A member shows up, finds the door locked, reads a sign, and is directed to waitwhile.com where they enter their phone number and are added to the queue while they go back and wait in their car. From waitwhile a text is sent to those on the inside who are keeping track of how many people are present. The member then receives a text from waitwhile when it’s time for them to be let in, and someone meets them at the door to open it.
Of course we could have written this software ourselves but we don’t have to because waitwhile already did it.
This way we don’t need anyone standing at the door. They’re just doing their own thing until they’re texted by waitwhile.
The part that’s a bit harder for us is that instead of counting people as they checkout and leave through the exit, we’d have to ask members to notify/text someone when they’re leaving. I suspect this would work just fine if we impose a penalty (temporary ban) for leaving without notification.
Once and future member here, if it will help to re-open DMS, I volunteer to implement a vision recognition system to count the number of people on camera at anytime using DMS’s existing surveillance cameras supplemented with Raspberry Pis for any remaining dark areas. Being able to count how many people are on camera is a fairly simple vision recognition 101 problem that I’ve already worked through on cloud, local and RasPi instances. The counting script could run every 30 secs with the RPis sending their counts to a head server for final tally. Once the count reaches reaches a certain threshold, say 72, the head server could alert D&O or possibly turn off the door lock. Throwing it out there, hope it helps.
See above for one possible solution, but also note that our daily unique member count is generally only about 10% of our active membership. And that’s “daily unique” whereas “maximum concurrent” will be even fewer. Personally I suspect we wouldn’t exceed 25% right now even with no restrictions in place, but I’ve seen multiple good ideas for how to implement restrictions and we clearly have enough volunteers stepping up to implement them. Worst case we might just have to close from 02:00 to 09:00 when even our regular brigade eventually goes home.
Assuming our occupancy restriction implementation involves someone letting people in one-by-one, just turn people away who aren’t wearing a mask. Further, encourage everyone to step up and ask a member to leave if they are seen not wearing their mask. For example woodshop is very good about self-policing the use of eye protection, and this isn’t much different. From what I’ve seen, grocery stores are only achieving about 80% success at mask enforcement. Frankly I’d be shocked if we achieved any less than 98%. Most members don’t want to risk getting banned.
Hopefully someone will be along shortly to turn this uncertainty into certainty one way or the other.
Personally I’m still contemplating this one.
Administration and its associated labor is the problem with an organization such as ours. With no direct employees, things happen at volunteer speed and with best effort service levels.
Wave the hand and we have some sort of software automation to reduce the workload for whoever is empowered to administer ins and outs with minimal glitches. Someone - and most likely someones - will still need to be onsite during any such periods of operation and their word will need to be both fair and absolute. Members will need to heed their instructions, promptly. And we’ll also need to sanitize the place far better than usual.
Well from what this whole situation has taught us is that waiting to need a plan and not having one ready to go when it is needed FAILS hard! So this is just my opinion but there needs to be some sort of meeting with bod and other heads/leaders and a clear Detailed plan of action needs to be hashed out so that when the time comes it’s very clear what’s needed to be don’t and how those things can really be implemented and followed. Now what that plan is isn’t up to me but whatever the higher ups decide we need hashed out in detail so when that time comes it’ll be a lot easier to unite the Makerspace under clear decisions