Constitution

[Ross]

I've created an early mockup of the constitution for the Makerspace. It's literally just a mix match of things that I've seen from Nottinghack's and London Hackspace's Constitutions/Articles of Associations (Mostly from Nottinghack). Have a look at it, make reccomendations here as to what you think is whack, or if you really want to, edit the Git, but don't mess things up (With bullshit trying to be funny). This will eventually be a binding document for all members of the Makerspace. It'll be a read you have to make to become an official member.

The files are in the LaTeX syntax format, which is essentially a language type thing to produce documents from code. It's reminiscent of BB Code and also the sort of thing you have to do to format Wiki pages. LaTeX will produce a .PDF based on this code and that'll be what you need to read in the final copy, whether or not it's online or printed out. We went with this over Markdown which is an HTML oriented syntax that does a somewhat similar job (This godawful interpretation is to my understanding. It gets the point across).

So, you can look at Nottinghack and LHS' documents here, here and here:

Nottinghack Constitution

Nottinghack Articles of Association

London Hackspace Articles of Association

We're aiming for the "Less BS" approach for now. We don't need anything legal in here in particular, just everything important about what the space is, how it's run etc.

And you can look at the raw code here, to get an idea of LaTeX:

LHS LaTeX Code

And follow this guide to learn more about how LaTeX works:

LaTeX for beginners

Note: None of this is anywhere near final, this is just my interpretation of things that have been discussed.

Here's the first mockup of the Constitution:

Chelmsford Makerspace Constitution

[RichardR]

Just a correction, the last link should be https://github.com/ChelmsfordMakerspace/documentation/blob/master/Constitution/Constitution%20Main.tex, I moved it in the git repository in to a folder.

[Ross]

Yeah, I just realised that was broken.

[Joseph Walton-Rivers]

Just a for your information. I wrote my final year dissertation in LaTeX and and more than willing to lend a hand with anything if you need assistance with it.The wikibooks LaTeX articles[1] are very helpful when trying to get your head around it as well.

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

[Ross]

That's great! Thanks for the info and offer.

[RichardR]

Ah nice, this should be a lot of help.

I'm currently working on the site updates and grant proposal so Ross is the one doing formatting and most writing on the document side.

[Ross]

Yep, I'll be getting back to that in a matter of days time.

[Ross]

A few updates have been made to the constitution and can be seen at the Chelmsford Makerspace GitHub.

https://github.com/ChelmsfordMakerspace/Documentation/blob/master/Constitution/Constitution%20Main.tex