Can we confirm Monday 15th May at 19:00?
Growth Working Group
yep
I’ll be later than that but please start without me 
Oops, NEXT Monday 
I nearly did that too 
Reminder: This is tonight at 19:00
@TomHedges @naxxfish @tomnewsom @peter_hellyer @lewisss @andrew_d
I didn’t know I was on the group, but I’ll come down anyway.
I can’t make it I’m afraid as my skin is on fire and I’m off to sit in a bucket of some kind of emollient.
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You don’t have to it’s optional.
I am in da spaace
Apologies, I’m not available tonight. Will hope to join the next meeting
Ok
I’ll be down after kids are in bed.
I’m bringing spreadsheets
Ace
I can’t make it tonight – still feeling a bit rough.
However: I’m of course very interested in this.
My stream of consciousness – much of it perhaps stating the obvious…
Seems like we need a way of monitoring/judging if we have too many members for the size of our space. It’s clear that there must be a size that’s too big - it’s not clear what that size is. Everything so far has been a guess. It seems like booking and queuing systems would go a long way to ease the pain for: lasercutter, woodshop and 3d Printer?
On the cultural side I’d like to push general inductions (orientations) as standard requirement for all members, and a dependency before shutter access. I note that shutter access might be coming up in the governance review, and agree that it needs a bit of shoring-up here and there. I also encourage us to find examples of organisations who manage to roll out positive culture across largish numbers of people. I’m going to take a guess that they do this by having people in place who embody and propagate the culture, rather than ‘rules’. However it needs a bit of proper research. I’m not sure I buy the story that LHS went wrong because it got too big…but it might be true, of course!
South London Swimminng Club is an example a group with over 1k members which keeps and extraordinary culture.
I’m, as is known, also still in favour of a ‘soft cap’. And interested to explore preferential membership for underrepresented groups too. Controversial as that might be.
We started the meeting by recapping the purpose of the group, and our aims as set out in the first post.
To be clear however the group isn’t here to meet and talk about our own opinions and make recommendations purely from that, but rather that we want to collect data and make recommendations on a broad spectrum of things.
Step 1: Interviewing @roles
Our first step is going to be interviewing all the @roles to find out how growth is affecting their area from their personal perspective. We’ll attempt to collect data from them at this point where they have it, and also identify where more data would be useful (more on this in a minute).
The interviews will be two or more non-@role members asking questions insitu in the area.
Roles to interview:
- directors
- events
- marketing
- systems
- 3d printing
- electronics
- laser cutting
- metal working
- screen printing
- textiles
- wood work
We’ll be asking 4 main questions, although additional questions may arrise from these interviews:
-
How many of the members do you serve?
This question is about getting numbers, so it could be inductions completed versus waiting, how many fellow techs there are, or how many people who are non-techs you work with. How many people offer inductions… etc… -
What do members do most frequently in your area?
This is more applicable to physical areas, but is about trying to identify the most popular areas (not necessarily the same as most contention). -
What facilities in your area have the most contention?
This could be human or physical resources, for example inductions and maintenance or too many people using it at certain times. -
Explaining the key areas
This one will be about going around your area and explaining (not what it does) but why it’s there is it used all the time, or rarely, could it be packed away to make more space, could we sell it and use a more appropriate alternative even?
We’ll also offer the techs an opportunity to give free form feedback, ideas which might fall out of the aims of the Growth WG, but we’ll feed them back.
Step 2: Space Census
We’ll be meeting up on Monday, 29th May 2017 at 19:00 again (this is a bank holiday) to meet about the space census:
- Trying to hash out a list of what we might want to ask members
- Why it these questions might be useful / what we can do with this data
- How we might do this and how we can incentivise members.
This is a parallel project that has some routes in this group, and measuring our diversity, but is also an opportunity to ask members stuff outside the remit of this group, so it’s kind of parallel but driven by the same folks.
Step 3: Tools for measuring utilisation
We’ll be meeting on Monday, 5th June 2017 at 19:00 to discuss what tools and data we have for measuring utilisation, and what new tools we might like to build.
From tonights meeting, this was broadly over three areas:
- Members at the space
- When are they here
- How long are they here
- How many area there
- Tools/areas/space in the space
- What are people using
- When
- How long
- Guest/visitors/open evening
- How many visitors are we getting per day?
We are hoping tool control to be up and running in the next few weeks before this meeting, and I’ve made some progress getting all our historical access data into one place, but we currently have no visitor log, this might be an interesting project to undertake.
Step 4: Financial options
@tomnewsom brought his funky financial forecasts (FFF) and modeled some interesting possibilities, the key point was that we are likely to have a 3 year lease at this space until October 2020.
The decisions of this group will affect if we can expand into a larger space, buy our own building, and whether we need to cap members.
His current predictions put us with just under 1,000 members and £450,000 in the bank if we don’t do anything. clearly that isn’t going to work.
We looked at a variety of options such as what if rent doubles and we want to have enough cash for a second premises…
These FFFs will allow us to report at the end that should we hard cap we will need this many members to achieve a second space, but the trade off is we can’t buy a building.
There will be a few FFFs to experiment with by the end with narratives behind each.
Step 5: Researching other spaces
Alongside this we’re going to reach out to a few other spaces who’ve got larger membership bases and interview them about how this affected their spaces:
What were the critical points at which your membership number affected the organisation and it’s members you and how did it affect them?
Step 6: Mid-point-meeting
Monday, 12th June 2017, 19:00
This meeting will be a chance to look at the data we’ve gathered, what we’re still waiting for and allow us to reframe the working group.
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Looks like a productive meeting
This is great.
I’m really wary of statements like this though –
If that’s the premise, I think the first task is to unpack that.
I don’t really see what you mean. This is based on Toms projections based on continued growth as it is right now.
It’s nothing more.
This is the just the “unbounded” top end from my prediction spreadsheet. Not a realistic scenario in any respect