What do we, as an organisation, do well? What are we getting right at the moment?
Providing tools the average Joe is unable to afford or have due to space constraints at home.
What do we, as an organisation, do abysmally? What are we getting wrong?
Community outreach, getting more members and building up the space.
Getting more of the membership involved and interested in helping out. The exec as always are burnt out, time poor and trying their best. But the organisation needs more people to step up to make it run smoothly.
What should we do in future? What specific changes do you want to see from the organisation?
Hang on and survive, it will be a shame to see HSBNE die. If this requires signing a lease at the paint factory, then we need to get it through. As long as the maths checks out and we can afford to rent the space with a slight decrease in membership (just in case member numbers do drop).
While members opinions are valuable, we as members need to take a step back and consider all the options on the table.
It is easy to dislike an idea, if someone has put a lot of effort into researching and presenting this idea, it can be heartbreaking to be the only viable option on the table but not being accepted. So I would like members in the future to be more aware that they need to also be putting in effort coming up with an alternatives before disliking all of the options presented. This is the only way we are going to move forward as an organisation and not stagnant and die.
What do we, as an organisation, do well? What are we getting right at the moment?
Access to machines and tools to members which would otherwise be unaffordable
Provide spaces (physical and virtual) for innovation, learning, meeting people with common interests
Infrastructure (interlocks, member tools, billing, wiki, forums, discord) is excellent, especially considering it is built and maintained by volunteer workforce
Hamilton location was very accessible to members from inner north and city.
What do we, as an organisation, do badly? What are we getting wrong?
Over-reliance on volunteering to run the space - admin, housekeeping, maintenance
Outreach to supporters - local government, like minded community organisations
What should we do in future? What specific changes do you want to see from the organisation?
Continue efforts (like this thread) to understand member expectations and gather feedback. Could build a feedback database; Member surveys (automated?);
Write a business strategy with a 2-5 year time horizon - short: 2-3 pages max
Maintain a Risk, Issues, and Opportunities (RIO) database (on the wiki?) that all members can see and interact with; review changes during general meetings;
This is an attempt to seed the discussion about developing a new strategy for HSBNE. There is a session scheduled on this discussion for late afternoon this coming Tue (17th Oct) at the Red Hill spot.
Chis has led off with some ideas and there are further comments.
So does anyone have a process for this that they know will ensure we make some progress in the time we spend on this? Does this process ensure that the ideas of all members are explicitly sought, either initially or for comments on an interim document? Do we need a facilitator for this?
Do we have an accurate idea of what the HSBNE organisation looks to like to those outside it who may have known of it for some time? For example, members who have resigned for whatever reason, affiliated groups (Team Arrow, Bne Tool Library, BMS). Might we have a somewhat exaggerated idea of our importance in the makerspace world? Do we concentrate too much on gear rather than the people, the members? Are we really a community or just geeks coming together to make things, with not enough empathy for the other members? Without sharing our knowledge and experience with our peer members? The people who join HSBNE, do we brief them well at the initial contact so they know what they will have to contribute to keep the organisation functioning?
We do need to consider questions about the current organisation; depending on the answers, one aspect of the strategy may be some organisational change. The approach that has got us to this stage may not be the one which takes us forward.
We are a much smaller organisation than we were 2 -3 months ago. By Xmas, we may be down BY 60% to about 40 members (and still falling?). Do we need to change our view of the world? Are we open to merging with some other group?