[[ Education ]] Status Update for Week 17 & winding up!

[Martin Bogomolni]

This Past Year in the Education Department

Wow.

I want to wrap up my term as Director of Education by first and foremost saying "Thank you!" to all our members.  From the start of my term to now, so many members pitched in and went above and beyond.

The last year was primarily about building our program and infrastructure for Education back up to a place where we could use the classroom, organize instructors, and handle scheduling and payments.

I'm certain that whoever takes on the role of Director of Education next now has the tools and support of the entire hackerspace to keep this momentum going!

Things I've Learned in the Last Year

Even with everyone wanting things, it's hard to keep the momentum going at the hackerspace.   It takes a lot of time, dedication, and effort to get things going.  However, one of the awesome things is that once the momentum is there, people at the hackerspace hold on to the new habits well.

The classroom has remained clean, useful, and maintained by everyone working together.  Everyone worked together, understood why the rules where there, and kept it organized.

Autonomy comes with responsibility.  If you touch a project at the hackerspace, you own it all the way through.  More and more of the space is getting serious, organized, and people are making a great effort to make the hackerspace somewhere that others want to be in!

It only takes one person to demotivate a crowd.  Trolling and the behaviours that go with it are things that need to be addressed directly, firmly, and decisively.  

Whenever possible, listen.  The people around the space have a huge amount of experience, and it's always beneficial to hear ideas all the way through.  You don't have to agree with each other.  When ideas or positions need debating, no matter how passionate you are about the subject, it's Reason that must prevail over hotter emotions.

The hackerspace is part business, part social club.  To keep things running, requires that the business be healthy.  To keep the business healthy, it's important to balance the needs and wants of the people who make up the space.  It's a balancing act.

Being a Director is a stressful, hard job that takes a lot of work no matter which role you take.  There are, frankly, few rewards other than the simple pleasure of knowing you've done a good job.  That said, you HAVE to do the job.  If you don't you are letting down hundreds of people.

Finally ... hackerspace members are AWESOME.  I truly and deeply believe that in my heart and soul.  I love seeing what gets done at the space, and I don't regret even for a moment putting it together.  I can't wait to see what the future will bring.

It's time we look hard at our Directorship roles, and how we run our hackerspace.  We will need paid, full-time employees to keep up with our needs and make the space grow into it's full potential.   We need to do the things any sucessful business does to stay stable, and lawful.

• Hire a bookkeeper alongside having our accountant
• Transition to having a full-time general manager for the hackerspace who understands the hackerspaces history, has many years of real-world experience in the role, and who will keep us on track
• Hire a full-time on-site facilities person to maintain our machines on a daily basis
• Examine having people operate the machines themselves vs having machinists operate them for some tools. 
• Reexamine our shop hours, to better serve the majority of people.  24 hour self-service may not be our best optiojn.  Have "office hours" and "member open/closed shop" hours to allow cleaning / reset and to stop people from sleeping/living at the hackerspace overnight.
• Hire a few people to be onsite during those business hours, as official employees of the hackerspace to help maintain our shop and service the needs of our members
  

Other hackerspaces and shops can do it, and I'm absolutely CERTAIN so can we.  I think it will be critical for us to continue growing and being the best we can be for Austin's maker and crafter community.

Winding up, and What's Next

In the next month, we will be holding our election for various board positions, including the Director of Education.  I'll be helping the next person to take the role, and working alongside them to ease the transition for a few weeks.

I am considering running for a Directorship role again, but not for this one.  It's time for someone with fresh energy, and passion for Education to take the role.

The new Director will oversee class scheduling, bringing on new instructors for all sort of classes, and be planning education outreach events.  We are transitioning away from Setmore ( with the exception of the upcoming Laser class tonight ) to Eventbrite for class scheduling.

If you have a knack for organizing people, have a penchant for documentation ( especially technical documentation! ) and a passion for education consider running for this role!

Email sent to dean@ will at first go to both of us for a couple weeks, and then just the new Director to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.   My email will switch over to "marti...@atxhs.org" afterwards for hackerspace related stuff.

As for me?  I'm definitely going to transition to working IT for the hackerspace alongside Elrod and taking care of our infrastructure.  

I've got twenty-five years of experience in the field, and it's something I have a lot of confidence doing.  It's also a part of the hackerspace that I think could use shoring up.  

We've been needing a lot of IT work and I'd like to help work on:

• upgrading our website and design
• improving our wiki and cleaning it up
• improving our member sign-up form and payment processing
• single sign-on for our computers and tools
• improving the keyfob system and expanding it
• tool control / lock-outs via keyfob 
• getting ethernet drops in more places at the hackerspace like CoWorking
• upgrading and consolidating our software and hardware

What an amazing year.

Sincerely,

Martin Bogomolni

Founder, Director of Education

ATX Hackerspace LLC

[Joe Buchoff]

Solid summary! I hope to be working with ya as the next director of Education this May!

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