Induction system

Hello @woodtechs @directors. I would like to say thanks a bunch for Makerspace, but I think the induction system is very unfair and an inconvenience for new members, especially if the member has commitments to prioritise. Honestly, I don’t feel its right to charge a new member £25 for a month and not have an induction in what they joined for eg. “Woodshop induction” and when the person has to work alot this just adds more unnecessary stress to that person’s load… do you work or come to the induction… because that’s the only one for a long time.

Please fix this bug

Yours kindly

This has been a challenge for years- how to safely get members on the tools.

Compared to similar workshops it is a bargain, others charge £25 per induction and up to £20 per hour for using a tool. The idea behind our community workshop is that everyone collaborates to make it work, but yes… that takes more time.

We are open to suggestions on a better way to run inductions, got any?

Otherwise I think we just need to better set expectations for new members that it may take several months to get on the tool of their choice- remember there are plenty of things that you can access without induction.

In the past we have been at capacity for membership and it has taken months or even years in some cases to even join - so it is all relative.

Best,
Andy

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I don’t think this is entirely fair, it’s definitely frustrating when there’s a tool you want to try out and can’t get inducted for, but you’ve got to remember that this place is entirely volunteer run + funded

At the end of the day, inductions are 100% necessary to prevent people breaking the tools / themselves and the woodtechs are running these inductions in their own time - there’s no way to really square that circle in a volunteer run space

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Just to add, as a volunteer run organization, it’s a balancing act to keep the wood shop running at an adequate level given the resources we have available. The inductions are necessary to help with this - in the past, before we had the current inductions, tools were just broken all the time. We are not a commercial space, and the membership costs reflect that quite heavily. For comparison - a monthly membership for woodworking (only) space in London at commercial organizations (that carries its own restrictions) costs closer to £150 and that’s before induction fees

There are dozens of tools in the wood shop that need to be kept in working order, along with the space itself, and the inductions need to happen on top of that. Running through the absolute basics takes a couple of hours for a group of people - it’s a decent amount of work for us to do along with our day jobs where we have to find 3-4 hour blocks in which to run them. That said, we’ve been making an effort behind the scenes to try to shorten the time commitment required to run an induction and formalize different pathways to induction, but unfortunately these things take time.

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It’s not a complete solution, but using instructional video might help. To illustrate, if an induction is normally for 12 people and takes an hour, if half of that can be delivered by video before going to the tool itself, then can have two groups with staggered start times and then would have twice as many people inducted in the same amount of trainer time. That video would also be a resource that people could access to refresh/ remind themselves if needed. There are other benefits such as being able to get close ups etc. (it can sometimes be hard to see clearly in a group). Some inductions might even be mostly by classroom video followed by some hands on work supervised by an experienced volunteer (widening the pool of who can give inductions).

People who give the inductions would have a sense of whether it could be feasible - it may work for some inductions but not others. If there’s potential in that, I’d suggest starting off by doing a very basic video recording of a normal induction on a mobile phone. Then can review that and see if it would work to split off part of the induction into a standard video.

“how to safely get members on the tools.” Similar to inflight safety video.

(I’d be happy to help out with doing that).

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Come join the video team!

The cnc, mig welding, and grinding videos are already in place and footage has been captured for the planer/thicknesses but it needs editing!

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