The Snug has become pretty much useless in recent months: hard to find anything, no more room to store live projects.
It feels like there’s a growing momentum to tackle it: at the very least so that we can stop storing projects in the workshops, and also with a view to moving ahead with the rebuild of the structure.
We’ll bring this up at the members’ meeting, but might as well find out who’s interested in getting the ball rolling.
To quote myself on the members meeting thread:
A few members have brought this us: it’s got to be tackled at some point…but would involve pulling everything out of the snug and dealing with each item. So several people on one day to get it started? Then a concerted effort to clear the ‘arisings’ from the initial evisceration of the snug…
How to get rid of stuff efficiently, responsibly and economically will be a major factor here.
I’d suggest not starting this until after the Christmas Party (this coming Saturday)…
But thoughts and suggestions welcome.
It may be that members just decide to tackle the task in small chunks? That could work too.
I reckon January is a good time to start this. I think it should start with a bunch of people for a couple of afternoons - enough people with knowledge of the contents that most decisions can be made, rather than lots of stuff being left to one side “in case someone else knows about it/wants it”?
I’m not 100% clear on the policy for stuff in the nearest half of the snug (general dumping ground) - but maybe members should be given until clear out day in January to submit storage requests/clearly label what’s theirs/remove things if they possibly can…
Then whatever is left on D-day without a label is either:
labelled as being for an imminent Makerspace project
fair game to anyone present who wants to claim it and submit a storage request or remove it - that day
to be disposed of
Should we think about asset tagging space tools/equipment?
PS - not just creating work for others - happy to help with some weekend clearing!
Definitely good to have people there who know what stuff is/why it’s worth keeping! Also part of my thinking on asset tagging - so that nothing valuable gets thrown away.
Plus one on all of this thread as far as I’m concerned. I will commit to devoting an entire weekend in January to getting the snug cleared out so it can be used. I think with at least 4 people, two days would do it. Questions:
Waste disposal - it’s probably at least a skipfull, maybe two. Can we do this?
What is behind the snug? Would it be possible/easier to remove stuff that way?
Agreed on defined schedule for proper retention or disposal per. @TomHedges above
Can we do both “sections” of the snug? Or one at a time?
How do we stop it getting junked up again?
What can/should snug space be used for afterwards? e.g. CNC machine etc.
Can we live with disposing of things that may be “useful” at some defined time in the future, but we do not realistically have storage space to keep?
What about those old PC’s?
I’m not proposing to answer these questions on Discourse; perhaps the interested parties could meet tomorrow night in the Space at the scheduled all members meeting time to discuss? Let’s come up with a plan, schedule the dates well in advance in January and recruit volunteers!
In his novel Makers, Corey Doctorow came up with an idea of rfid-ing everything you own, and then dumping it all in smart bins. The idea is you don’t need to know where something is, just find it in your database (on your phone for example) and then hit “locate” and the bin with the stuff in will flash blue. Kinda like the car key whistle thing but for all the stuff you own.
It’s one of the things in the novel which I always thought “damn, that would be neat”, but I don’t like the fact that it will take trace amounts of power to e.g. run the beacons and readers on the bins, and also the idea of putting rfids on everything I own. That said I thought it would be useful for a workshop environment.
I won’t attempt to answer them all, and most of them are best discussed in person as you say, but it’s worth noting the following facts:
The snug backs onto private gardens of the houses on Stradella Road. No access.
The snug is currently a room-within-a-room-within-a-room, as far as the building regulations for fire escape are concerned. This makes any habitable use of it impossible without opening it up to be part of the main workshop or maybe installing sprinklers/misters to the other workshops. See here and here for previous discussion of this topic.
The new space must be expansions of the existing Messy and Dusty rooms, by removing the blockwork under the lintels already built in the rear wall for this purpose, visible in this old drawing:
Happy to help as well, is there some low hanging fruit we can deal with in advance of a big clearout?
I feel like I have seen things marked for storage that are well past their planned timeframes for instance…
Or maybe we tackle something med-large like the PCs as a project? How much older PC stuff does it make sense to keep? I have used the random USB keyboard and mouse for use with Raspberry PIs for instance, but not sure we would ever need 10 cases etc…
