I have been ‘guilty’ of treating Stan’s “desk” as a general information desk. He doesn’t seem to mind.
also! i have had people ask me in person “hey what’s the access code for (X machine)” and i point them to the talk page and their face lights up like they’ve never even considered that. a more prominent talk page location on the various web interfaces might help.
yes. little known fact that he was quite the arm twister.
@artg_dms, I don’t white wash the past history of BODs, in fact I mentioned them in the quote you pulled. I feel Kris stands above a lot of the previous BOD in the Us vs Them scenarios in the fact the she started the public hit list technique. She has lead membership meetings where she has disparaged her hit list of members, while those members where actively trying to participate in the meeting.
I don’t understand your comment about participating as committee head but not as a volunteer. Is this just another one of your “you didn’t help with some single event thus you no longer have the ability to be part of dms” claims again? I pay my dues and fulfill my membership requirements and have done so for years now. This is a bogus argument and Your trying to push members out of discussions by falsely claiming they can’t have input on topics. This needs to stop. This spreads confusion to those less informed and in no way can be construed as appropriate or excellent behavior among members.
Stop being a bunch of dicks to people who actually volunteer.
That’s my two cents.
Sense of community. Reach out to and involve more people, especially at the committee level. High performing teams are motivated by a sense of loyalty to each other - not necessarily to the organization or the “mission”. They show up so they don’t let each other down.
Manageable bites. It is nearly impossible to get a volunteer to tackle and follow-through on a large, complex task with a long timeline and a lot of uncertainties. However, once a project is dissected into smaller tasks more people are willing/able to commit.
Obviously we need to recognize and appreciate all of the volunteer efforts - that’s crucial - but I don’t have any good suggestions for that. I don’t necessarily mean formal recognition - a simple, heartfelt thank you can frequently be enough.
Let’s expand your comment to $0.25 cents. I think you have more to say on the topic and I personally would like to hear how volunteers are being treated.
I do think our community has fractured a bit between “old” and ‘new’. Us old timers do feel a little swamped with the influx of new members. We are glad to have them but the majority of new members are here for what was offered during the tour, access to tools. A lot of us old timers were here to build a makerspace and it’s community. We are so big now there are multiple communities onsite and off. Each has a different list of preferences and method of operating.
I don’t think it’s an old timer vs new timer thing. I suspect, but cannot prove, that our volunteer rate has declined and I’d like to understand that.
When there were 30 members (before my time), probably 30 of them volunteered for things (100% or close).
When there were 300 members, probably 50-60 of them were hard-core volunteers (20%)
Now there are 2000 members, and possibly as many as 200 volunteers. (10%) (this is a wild-ass guess and if someone has real data please offer it). I’m not discounting the contribution of someone who teaches a class infrequently, but I’m not counting that in the “hard core volunteers” category who keep daily/weekly operations running.
The amount of volunteer work needed to keep the organization afloat has increased significantly, but it appears (again, without any data) that the percentage of the organization actually doing the volunteer work has probably decreased. This burns out the volunteers more quickly.
Perhaps with size we’ve lost the sense of community that drives volunteer efforts. Perhaps with more members the typical member is now one who comes less frequently - and consequently feels like they shouldn’t need to volunteer when they’re only here infrequently.
There was, at one point, a discussion of having a new members “all about DMS” class where they would be given a more in depth overview of the space, and allow them to ask questions that didn’t (and can’t) be answered during a tour. Maybe run that once or twice a month. That would be an opportune time to let folks know about volunteering and how they can fit in.
Also, my 2 cents and how I operate, is befriend a few folks slowly over time. Once you have built enough rapport with them, then you can start getting them involved in teaching or volunteering. People are way more willing to help someone out they consider a friend, or at the very least someone who has spent time working with and helping them with projects, than they are a general call to arms over Talk. So everyone on this thread, go make 2-3 new friends in 2019 and by the end of the year we will have another 50 volunteers. By 2023 we should have about 4,050 people willing to come help out.
This! I love this! Great suggestion.
This isn’t true as I am constantly seeing new members step up and volunteer. The best way I know to get people involved is to stop and talk to them and get to know them. Then ask if they want to help with something small in their area of interest.
My personal observations mimics yours in some ways. I watched DMS for probably 2 or 3 months before joining. I wouldn’t say weren’t at the 100% Volunteer threshold when I joined. But, by the time I was an active member (I was the 42nd member of DMS for reference) the percentage of Core Supporters in the group was a strong 50% to 70% of the group. When I say Core Supporters, I’m not just talking about who volunteered at the space, I’m also talking about paying attention to the actual running of the DMS. This included the discussion of issues, the finding of information, and just the trying to understand the structure of DMS and it’s running.
I would guess general membership had a marked decline in the wanting to know how DMS runs during the decision process of moving to Monetary. There were multiple factors that I feel lead to this. A large one was the amount of opinions due to our membership numbers were very difficult to deal with. As well as the negotiation abilities of having a large group gather information. This lead to the cementing of a social change in our group, when the BOD at the time took some of the largest step to that date of separating not only the decision making on the move, but who is allowed to gather information for the decision.
From there we have continued to grow in our secrecy and limitation on input for decisions in DMS as well as our loss of the general membership wanting to be involved in the decisions. Committees at one point were the clearest example of this kind of secrecy and limited access, but there have been changes to the processes for committees to try and combat this structure in our group. We all saw a marked increase in volunteering as those changes took effect.
So people talk to me sometimes about the energy brought by Creative Arts and our wild hedonism of our volunteer hippies willing to always weigh in on what we do and dive down deep into dusty digs. They wonder how I do it and what quality of crack I put in the brownies. Here’s a secret - I do very little, and only the highest quality of crack a single public school teacher can afford.
Like others, I believe an “on boarding” for new members or existing members helps - this could easily be done at member meetings but (from what I’ve heard) they aren’t well attended. Some members (me included) just DON’T know HOW to help but have the energy to help. Explaining the energy of DMS and the tasks needed would greatly increase interest and I believe increase turnout of volunteers for each area.
I also think monthly “work” days for committees will help. Getting your community together to communicate about goals is the best possible thing to do to figure out where you want to go together and who needs to drive and who needs to hold the map. This is something Creative Arts has failed at recently. We could benefit from a monthly cleanup but dang it I don’t have time lately.
A physical board and a way to communicate what needs to be done. A “to-do/to-done”. I believe this can be done in two different ways
Post a wall/board where tasks can be easily found/easily understood. We do a huge cleanup day in my classroom several times. I write specifics of what I expect. “Clean off the black counter, you can find the cleaner next to the sink, throw away anything that is crumpled, blah blah blah”
Create a remind (this is a one way text messaging service) specific for volunteer opportunities and bi-weekly (or whatever timeframe) send out a list (created by PR curated by committee chairs) of the big to-do goals of the two weeks. Things happen quick here so this would be reserved for big things, big plans, and big to-do’s not the “take out the trash”
Yep…indeed, it is expected, or used to be. I don’t remember who first mentioned/explained it to me, but I took it to heart: for-profit Makerspaces with employees charge 2, 3, 4 times what DMS asks for. We pay such a small amount of money for dues each month because we are the employees; if all you do is come in, make your make, clean up your mess, and leave, you are really not fulfilling the implicit bargain/social contract that everyone should understand exists here.
Our desired culture of volunteerism should be made excruciatingly clear during tours (start and end tours with this statement of our ethos, in fact); in the onboarding email suggested by @indytruks138 and other onboarding efforts; at the beginning of Membership, BoD, and committee meetings (think pledge of allegiance, but basic statement of our ethos instead); and it couldn’t hurt to have a set of “take-one” card stands around the place, maybe at or near every pay or information kiosk, that pretty much says “you are expected to give back/volunteer.”
Behaviors like these are the beginnings of how a culture of volunteerism can begin to be inculcated in membership as a whole.
To build on this, and incorporate the ideas from other for “remote access to-do lists”
how about something like this?
https://gsuite.google.com/products/jamboard/ They start about $5k per.
(spitballing with half-baked balls here, people! Jump in with something better/cheaper.)
Then a web page to collate the committee’s jamboards (or whatever) onto a “trello-style” to-do web page for DMS…
Man jamboards look freakishly awesome, but completely silly for what we need and where were at. I would say something like this:
Might do the job.
If we want to go super fancy we can repurpose a white board.
Price=better
connectivity!=better
While I strongly agree with volunteerism, I think we are setting unrealistic expectations for ourselves.
When a group is small, the opportunity for social structure and harmony is great. As the group grows it becomes harded to maintain. You reference an implicit bargain/social contract that everyone should understand exists. I’m not seeing it.
I think it is terribly unrealistic to expect we are going to see the level of engagement with 2000 members in comparison to 200. The issues I see are, someone else will help syndrome, its not a big deal its just some dust disease, this is my personal workshop illness and the final and dreaded I paid my money and don’t care contagion.
Communication of needs is the #1 issue.
Not everyone can walk in, identify a problem, generate a solution and execute. This is ok. To see problems you have to have some frame of reference. To generate a solution you have to have some experience in the subject. To execute a solution you have to have motivation. To expect people to complete the lifecycle is unrealistic. I do however believe we can help jumpstart this process, this to requires manpower, a framework, etc. I realize that not all our problems require this, lots do however. The nature of people is such that many are not comfortable being proactive. The lack of comfort is for many reasons, afraid of doing it wrong, afraid of criticism of job, lack of knowledge, etc.
Gotta step away for a few, more to come.
And the pound of flesh some want via Talk when someone does it wrong.
While that is one possibility, I don’t think it plays nearly as large a factor as you might believe. I would surmise that more than 3/4 of our members do not use talk.
I am not downplaying the possibility, I just think that we have confirmation bias on the issue.