Your comment piqued my curiosity. The primary guidelines for committees were established by the BoD 2 - 3 years back. What would you change to make it better?
Volunteerism in general. I have witnessed volunteers burn out. I have seen volunteers criticized by the clueless and ungrateful. Tribal / camp affiliations and afflictions and the “efficient” politics there of are very much alive and well. Not seeing any fixes or solutions. What do you suggest?
Better?
Looking forward to posts on this topic. 
Me too.
We like to bitch.
It’s easy to do.
Putting forth ideas to fix things, less so.
But Luke tends to have great ideas, so I’m hoping you’ll inspire him to put them here.
And that this will spawn a debate in earnest about what we can do to recruit and retain membership, and from those, recruit and retain leaders who want to chair committees and lead membership into teaching, learning, and, overall, making. 
My time is worth more to me than anyone is willing to pay. I volunteer because I not only want DMS to prosper but because I think it is a viable organization. I still want DMS to prosper but I’m not sure it is a viable organization.
When I see people post that $25 honorarium isn’t enough to get them to teach classes I begin to worry about it’s viability. DMS isn’t a meal ticket. It can never be a meal ticket, not without raising the membership fees several orders of magnitude. If we start paying people for their time spent here we will lose our volunteers. The DMS model can’t work without volunteers.
I think that the members need to examine what they expect DMS to be for them. There are people that truly love DMS and volunteer for the right reasons, not nearly enough though. Or maybe they are drown out by all of the people that want a return on their membership fees.
The clueless and ungrateful will always be around, we should not let them bother us. We should be teaching and volunteering for ourselves and our own satisfaction. We should not expect gratitude. Unexpected gratitude is much sweeter than artificial gratitude.
Learn that the flood of satisfaction we get when we finish a project and we are happy with the result can be the same feeling we get when we volunteer with no expectations of compensation and we are happy with that result too.
Russell Ward
Surely an admirable position, but not everyone can afford that level of volunteerism. While I definitely think we need people who are pure volunteers, some folks have to consider their budget.
For instance, some of the folks who didn’t want to teach for the $25 have to consider how much gasoline costs, as they are coming quite a distance. I heard at least 2 people say that $25 made it very marginal for them. And, many creative people don’t make the larger engineering salaries that fuel some of the retirement benefits that give some of y’all the leisure of coming a distance and not worrying about what that does to this month’s budget.
There’s also the amount of time that some of the teaching can take up a load of time. When none of the retired guys in woodshop stepped up to take the load of teaching all the safety/equipment classes, a person who needed, effectively, a salary to devote the amount of time that the teaching needed did step up. And… that was a bit much for the overall DMS budget. But – we didn’t have folks asking for woodshop basic classes for a while.
Yes, volunteering can leave one with a nice glow, provided one has been appreciated or sees that they’ve contributed. Everybody has something different that makes them happy – recognition; job well done; cold hard cash…
I don’t know who hijacked my brain and made me write that post. 
Anyone that knows me very well probably doesn’t know where that post came from. Just to show that I haven’t gone all nimby-pamby let me expand on those thoughts.
I was a little uneasy about the original honorarium payouts, not because I thought that the original intent was a problem, but because I was afraid that it would become abused. I think that the first couple of years I was a member it worked well. Then it started to be abused. I taught classes and donated the honorarium to a committee. The people that I knew were taking the honorarium I felt were deserving needy, buying gas to get to DMS like in your example. It may have been caused by the amount of money flowing through our treasury but then people looked at it as “free money” and I am just as deserving as anyone else.
The explosion of groups that wanted money to run their own area discovered that if they required an honorarium class to use their tools they could get a steady revenue stream from mandatory classes. Which was bad enough but there was at least one committee that decided they could get even more income by declaring that the old training class wasn’t sufficient any more and everyone had to retake the new class to be able to use the equipment. Then they went overboard, in my opinion, and decided that there should be 4 classes to use the committee’s tools.
I think that is what killed the old honorarium system and caused the financial problems with honorariums. My main target of my earlier post was the people that don’t need the honorarium but wanted it with no thought of the effect on DMS.
It is supposed to be a “Thank you” for teaching a class. Anyone that takes the honorarium that doesn’t need it to allow them to come and volunteer at DMS should be ashamed to take the money. Anyone that takes the honorarium so that they can come to DMS and make it a more inviting place should not be ashamed to take the money.
I don’t have any disagreement with your post. I was aiming at a different target.
Russell Ward
My problem with the way we do things is the constant refrain of “just come to the meeting”.
I have limited time to spend at the space. I do NOT want to spend that limited time in meetings.
There needs to be a mechanism other than “sit in a meeting that should have been an email” to get input into how things are done. Inputs are often provided here on talk. And then largely ignored since they are not at a meeting. Perhaps that should change.
Volunteering is a little daunting… I’m looking for ways to help out, but I have 2 barriers…
First, I’m not ready to fully own a big project… I’ll get there, but I kinda want to tag along on projects like maintenance until I’m familiar with them. Over time, I could see myself accepting responsibility for more.
Second, I’m on Talk 2-3 times / week but I still miss most of the organized projects. (Example: Build an electrical drop… Perfect and right up my alley… but I was out of town and the demand seemed to peter out by the time I got back)
As an afterthought, I prefer 85% work, 15% social, 0% drama… rare mix… this post has constructive posts… thank you for that!
Overall… I love the Makerspace paradigm. I’m happy to support the progress there…
Jack
Almost all of the autonomy and authority of chairpersons has been stripped away in favor of giving members more say in day to day operations at the committee level. More people (who are usually less qualified) having a say doesn’t make things better. It makes things slower, harder, and worse. It’s stupid now and it was stupid when it was implemented.
Give highly qualified and highly motivated people autonomy and enable them fully. Give every chairperson a credit card (and make credit checks mandatory). Cut the red tape and stop voting on trivial things. If they fuck up then replace them. If they do a good job then do everything you can to keep them. The ungrateful and clueless will always be there and always have been but I don’t think that’s why many people have largely stopped trying to volunteer.
I believe developing leadership at the committee level increases member engagement. Many individual contributors that are placed in a leadership role do not respect people, have no value for them, and believe they are a just in the way. The skill set to turn a complaint into an asset just isn’t there. They will get the job done, sometimes very efficiently, and might even get a handful of close friends to help, but at the expense of driving off many other would-be volunteers, while deteriorating membership culture.
That’s nice but all of it goes out the window when many committee chairpersons go uncontested and some have no candidate at all. Let alone someone qualified. Nobody wants the role because it’s a shit role right now. I would get auto back in shape in a heartbeat if given the authority and autonomy to. Nuts to scheduling a meeting to vote to decide what sockets to buy. I have better things to do and apparently so do other people. The writing is on the wall. It’s not working right now.
This.
Being able to fix the thing, or run the thing is common. Being able to offer fair solutions, by empowering the committees members, and not create exclusivity by groups via leadership is not.
Members are afraid to address the issues. The groups will say no drama let’s just make, the members will say no one listens, new members will just quit cause they don’t know how who to ask, and BoD does not micro manage committees.
How about leave it up to the chairperson? If they want to allow themselves to be micromanaged by members and run things like they are now then they can. But don’t make everyone confirm to that model if it’s a deal breaker. I would say a chairperson that isn’t ideal in your eyes is better than a vacancy.
@artg_dms makes a good point about politics spoiling volunteerism. Our volunteers were weaponized against each other under the previous 2 BODs. This placed a hard line in the sand between those that supported @Kriskat30 and her actions and those that did not. Still this divide stays in our organization and haunts many of the success around the DMS as successes for some feel like failures for others. I hope we have the time to over come this divide before we lose our group to financial or social woes. I also hope our members in power don’t further the tactics of appease enough to get your way, rather than aim for appeasing the group as a whole.
@Gimli also brings up the large concern on volunteerism at DMS. While some may requirement payment from DMS to have the means for aiding the group. Others falsely garner this sympathy and take far more from the group, while also exploiting areas of the organization. This has become the issue with honorariums. When we were too naive as an organization for large scale exploitation of honorarium, it worked well. But, as we expanded and didn’t watch the program, enough had exploited it to the point of financial distress of the group. To make matters worse, these exploits also poisoned the culture around volunteering. When honorariums started, the common thought with classes seemed to be, what can I teach with $50 in consumables donated to the class. Now, I feel like the question is how many times can I teach a class to make it profitable for me?
The meeting brought up by @tmc4242. I believe this is a issue of the earlier political issue of targeting enough to get your way rather than trying to serve the greater whole of the group. The in person meetings are an easy way to limit input when you don’t want it. They are also a good way to stack a deck in your favor. Lastly, they are the best way to block the greater space from knowing how anything is run in the committee as records are seldom comprehensive or in many cases not ever made. I feel given these three points, no in person meeting should ever be recognized by the group without a A/V recording to allow the greater space an opportunity to justify the actions of the meeting.
I know @lukeiamyourfather wants to further empower a smaller group of individuals, with very little over sight. But, I believe that kind of volunteerism has been corrupted in our group and is no longer viable. We have too many examples in our group of these individuals self serving and hurting the group as a whole. And those that have self served reach to some of the individuals held in the highest respect in our group. Due to this track record, I wouldn’t suggest we ever lean that way again. Also, when you look to other non-profits our size and larger, the vast majority also do not tend to be organized in that manner. We should probably recognize that and observe it in our own practices.
I don’t appreciate the spin doctoring. I want to enable highly qualified and highly motivated people and nothing about that says it’s a small group of people. I never said very little oversight. If that’s what you think I said then you’ve misunderstood.
Nick’s interpretation of what has happened in the past is accurate.
We have had VERY capable and very motivated volunteers - That Just Would Not Listen.
We may have erred too far in the direction of oversight. But some was needed. Urgently.
You have read in layer upon layer of unintended meaning about meetings.
We have very poor meetings. Much of what we handle at meetings should be done before hand electronically. There should be a settled consent agenda passed at the beginning of each meeting to dispense with the mundane and routine.
Speaking of agendas - there should be one for each meeting. Published electronically. Before the meeting.
And another personal opinion - if we’re going to start requiring recording at meetings, that’s the end. The very last straw. I despise good meetings. ( and I have yet to see one of those at DMS ). This would go so far into “bad meeting” territory that it would not be worth bothering. I would never attend another meeting.
The freebie shelf? That grudge is more important than anything else apparently. We don’t need chairpersons. We just need a freebie shelf. That’ll take care of everything. 