[open-science] Advice for starting an open community lab/biomakespace?

Wed Dec 2 15:38:20 UTC 2015

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 2:31 AM, Jenny Molloy <jcmcoppice12 at gmail.com> wrote:

> [...] However, we've been running successful pub meets for over 18 months,
> talking about a space and running Science Makers events looking at and
> building open lab hardware for over 6 months. We've got 20-40 hardcore
> community members and 320 on the meetup [...]
>

The number of core people is really excellent!

balancing that with catering for existing members, managing
> responsibilities associated with inhabiting a university space and having
> time to do what we can well and not exhausting everyone involved (thanks
> Sheila for raising the issue of volunteer burn-out!). It will be an
> adventure!
>

You're welcome. We've worked at managing this by creating area hosts and
special volunteer positions that we review on a yearly basis or at the
discretion of the board.

https://wiki.pumpingstationone.org/Area_Hosts_and_Volunteer_Positions_Vote

It works to varying degrees of success (less successful for very popular
areas where we have more people wanting to use things).

We still have trouble with board burnout. We might hire a board consultant
to get professional advice on logistics to help with this. Based on a
couple of conversations, it sounds like there are some things we can do to
improve things.

Your group sounds great already, cheers!

-- 
shekay at pobox.com
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