There is a committee meeting next Tuesday that all members of makehackvoid are invited to attend. The space will open at 6:30pm for the meeting to start at 7pm.
If you look in the committee category on this forum, you will see that we are having some problems with the running of MHV. There are many well-meaning people in the community, but we don’t seem to
have a functional group of people able to run and administer MHV.
This meeting will be to discuss where we go from here and see if more people are able to be active in running MHV.
The treasurer position on committee has been vacant for a long time and I am likely to resign from the committee on Tuesday as I feel I’ve done as much as I can for now.
While making and hacking continued upstairs some of us went downstairs for a meeting. Tim and Cameron have both resigned from the committee and I resigned at the meeting so there were three vacancies which have been filled by Lachlan Horne, Jamie Reid and Paul Garrett until the AGM. Lachlan has offered to be Treasurer until then.
As well as the new people joining committee, Tim Nagel has offered to get the laser cutter purchase back on track now that the large garage is almost ready for it.
There was a discussion around additional responsibilities for key holders. One of the main suggestions was asking them to commit to opening the space every one to two months and to making announcements on the forum, facebook and calendar about when they are opening. They would be welcome to suggest a theme or focus for their opening. The aim is to have the space open at least as often as it is now, but by more people.
It was also suggested that maker meetups be changed from the current schedule to being the first Tuesday of each month. The turnout at maker meetups has been low lately and by having one a month we can get back to having a good number of people and presentations. With the warmer weather meetups can be held in the large garage downstairs so more people can see the presentation. We would still be committed to maintaining Tuesday nights as an open, visitor friendly time each week.
Our new membership structure means that visitors and new members are welcome any time that the space is open, so we don’t need the ‘meetup’ evenings for visitors access.
A final discussion was around rebooting the workshops system on the wiki. The space is now ready to be used for workshops again. Jamie has offered to go through the wiki and remove all the old lists of names of people interested in doing workshops and/or willing to run workshops. Then people can start again by putting their names down on things they would like to attend or are offering to run and setting a date and time to go ahead with it.
I’ve enjoyed most of my time on the committee and intend to keep coming to MHV. I think that the ideas that were suggested tonight will help the new committee improve MHV. If you have other suggestions or ways you can contribute please continue the discussion here.
At the outset I think a huge thank you to @brenda is in order. The amount of work she’s put in to MHV has been incredible and I like to extend my personal thanks to her.
I’ll put my broader thoughts about the topics raised up when I have more time to formulate them.
I’d like to add my thanks to Brenda for all the work she has done keeping MHV operating over a long and difficult period.
it will take several people to fill her shoes.
I think we keyholders do have to accept a bit more responsibility for having the space opened regularly and for organising occasional workshops, working bees and special events to maintain a minimum level of (predictable/scheduled) activity.
MHV seems to nearly reach a critical mass of engaged and active members every year or so and then, for understandable reasons, drift back to just a few active people. We need to find a way to harness the spirit of the good times and maintain it.
