Hi people, I hope everybody is doing well.
In this occasion, I want to tell you all about the woodshop plan until March 2021.
For a little bit of context, in the last few months, all cause leaders have been asked to do the following things:
- Create a team of people to run the cause.
- Come up with a plan to get all the machinery accessible and documented.
- Create a list of consumables that the cause will provide to the membership.
In the following post, I will explain what’s my plan and thoughts
As a rough blueprint, I have uploaded this mind map that I made to come up with this plan on the following link:
About the team
I don’t believe that forming a team is a task that’s easy or at the end, useful with the actual conditions that HSBNE provides.
In other words, without having the ability to pay for labour and actually delegate tasks with the expectation of a certain due date, looking for a team is a task that I would deem high effort/low impact.
Having said this, we do have a solid core of people who in one way or another make a huge contribution to the woodshop, mainly they are:
Josh and Murray
The way that the three of us work is basically taking certain tasks and work them on our own, keeping a good communication though Trello and verbally, reporting status and asking for advice and such.
Then we have the people who show up to Wednesdays meetings to support some of the projects and chores that needed to be done.
Delegating task in this scenario has its particularities such as:
- You need to assess the skills of that particular person and keep an eye on the engagement they are having. People come to help, but their help is not unrestricted, they want to do something that they like and engages them.
- In a similar way their commitment is momentary and you need to look for objectives that can be accomplished on that same evening. Because of this, tasks such as research and inquiries are hard to delegate, people “just don’t have time”.
People worth mentioning in this group are:
Tim and Richard.
They have shown up almost every night for the last couple of month and done most of the cabling/ducting work, work on the machines and did the soft Demo for the roller door.
As well on the last couple of meetings, some new people have approach interested in the documenting aspect of things.
So having in mind all the aforementioned things, I think that when it comes to wiki work, I might be able to ask certain people to do a particular part of the wiki page for us.
Is worth to say that Murray and josh have done a lot of wiki work lately, without the need to assign tasks.
For the induction part, I believe that it would have to be done by the strong core of the shop because is a task that needs a lot of knowledge, understanding, compromise and commitment.
If you want to participate and support the cause in these matters, I would ask you to come to our Wednesdays Meetings (every Wednesday at 6pm) and start doing.
Because actually doing is more than making any kind of spoken commitment.
Being a volunteer at the hsbne is kinda crazy and doesn’t make any sense, you need to be a little bit crazy and in love with the space.
Literally, all the work that we do as volunteers is highly professional and technical stuff that’s not getting paid and most of the time is not credited.
So I’m not going to try or push people into this. If you are crazy as I’m, come aboard.
I have my reasons to do it. Professionally this is an opportunity to develop my career (I’m a cabinet maker) by teaching, creating resources and work with people.
The reason
The main reason why we want to get everything documented is to be able to provide everybody with a universal tool that will allow them to use the machinery correctly.
By doing it this way, you won’t have to chase people around to learn how to use a machine o being cleared to use it.
The goals of my plan
- All the machines should have an interlock and every member who wants to use them should be inducted properly to get access to them.
- All the machines should have normalized Wiki documentation.
- Work smarter not harder
- Spend more time improving than fixing
- Increase membership
- Increase membership retention
The objectives
- WAD 1 Machine on November
- WAD 2 Machines on December
- WAD 2 Machines on January 2021
- Create Shop induction on February 2021
- Implement mandatory shop induction on March 2021
Values
- Leave it better that you found it
- Enforce them trough before and after pictures
What we are going to provide
For a list just check the mind map link (under consumables)
Thanks for reading! happy to answer any of your questions.