MN Collaboration tools
Maker Nexus uses a variety of tools to facilitate communication, collaboration, and dissemination of information inside and outside the organization. Some of these are self-hosted and administered by members (e.g. this wiki and our badge system), while others are provided to Maker Nexus as a hosted service (e.g. #Slack and #Google Workspace). Although tools, techniques, and technologies are always changing, the following list is what we currently rely on, and encourage members to use as well. If you are interested in testing out new software tools, you can create a group of like-minded people and pitch the idea on Slack.
Website
The Maker Nexus homepage is the public-facing entry portal to our organization. It has the most current information about the Maker Nexus organization. Website content is overseen and managed by the Executive Director.
Slack
Slack (corp site) is a popular, proprietary group chat platform used by many enterprises and organizations. Discussions are organized into "channels" based on topic and function like many other online chat systems; we do not use Discord. Slack is the primary way to engage in low-latency, ephemeral communication with other members and staff and is great for things such as arranging for training, asking questions about machines, suggesting ideas, and sharing pictures of project progress or your pets. Here are some tips on using Slack.
Google Workspace
Google workspace provides a large collection of the tools that we use regularly, including email, documents, spreadsheets, calendars. Each Maker Nexus member is provided a Google Workspace account in the form of firstname.lastname@makernexus.org If you don't have access to your account, email info@makernexus.org
- MN Members: Where the vast majority of documents live. You must access this using your @makernexus.org Google account.
- MN Public: Documents in this drive are available to the general public without access control. As a result, we generally put copies of documents here.
- Staff: The docs here are about keeping the makerspace running, but contain information that is not appropriate to share with all members.
- Finance: A few people who work on accounting tasks have access to this.
- Board of Directors: Only available to official board members. Being an open organization, we try to keep very few documents here. However, some information must be tightly held. For example, personnel docs, contracts with strict NDAs, working documents that the board has not gotten to the point of sharing the proposal with others, etc. If you want to know what's here, ask a board member.
- IT Backups: Only available to a few people. It holds backups of our systems and share drives.
We have a few others, but try to use these existing Shared Drives so that we don't have too many "buckets" to choose from when saving a new document.
Wiki
This wiki is a repository of public information. Here we try to document more factual things, after they have been hammered out by a group. This wiki is public. Anyone can read what is here. Anyone can contribute. You can sign up for a wiki account in the upper right corner of this screen. This wiki contains information about Maker Nexus. It also serves as a knowledge base for the larger community of makers around the world - you can see that on the home page of the wiki.
info@makernexus.org Someone monitors this email daily. If you need something or have some question, don't hesitate to send in an email. Please try to put something descriptive in the subject line.
Each member also receives an email that is your Google Workspace user to access our team drives. Your email is in the form of firstname.lastname@makernexus.org If you have trouble accessing your Google Workspace account, please email info@makernexus.org
Amilia
Our CRM. It keeps track of account information, personal training records, and is used to manage equipment and room reservations and classes. Members can access it through self service portal. The Member Dashboard provides links to many systems.
Activity Hero
Activity Hero is used for teen class registration. To sign up for a class you need to create a user on the Activity Hero site.
Documents in the Public Share are available for the world to view. They often have a link to them from a page in this wiki.
Anyone can view this share drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OVtDCs4H-r3UAqqseN0YeRGuM22ZraeF?usp=sharing
An Example
As an example of how these all might work... You think we need a policy on cooking in the break room. On Slack post in #general that you are interested in a new policy about cooking in the break room. See if you get positive response from others. Socialize this policy by asking staff if they think it would be a good idea. Talk with a member of the management team to get their support. Since this policy would affect all members and guests, be sure to have a brief talk with the Executive Director to get their agreement - not with specifics, but that they agree a policy might be a good idea.
If you get a lot of positive response, then start a new Slack channel with an appropriate name (#breakroompolicy might work for this) and invite people you know are interested in the topic. Post in the #general channel and ask people to join your group in the new channel.
After some lively discussion the group realizes that this is going to take some group work and longer term focus. They chat in Slack and decide to create a new folder in the MN Members Shared Drive to capture their ideas. They gather some existing policy statements about cooking in the breakroom from the websites of other makerspaces. They create a new Google Doc and begin assembling a policy statement. They involve at least one staff member, since this policy will need Executive Director approval.
Eventually the group has a policy statement that they all support. They ask the Executive Director to review it, approve it, and implement it.
If the ED agrees, then a communication plan is made to alert members and guests and staff. Appropriate signage is created as needed. The policy is moved into other documents where appropriate, perhaps the Member Handbook, the Membership Agreement, the working document for an area of the makerspace, perhaps this wiki. The working document in the shared drive is deleted.
All that could have been done in a day by one person without any of these tools. However, if the issue is contentious or very complex, the tools help the team converge on a solution.
Tools We Are Testing
Trello
We have a few people using Trello for To-Do list management. Ask and you can be added to the group.
Tools We Do Not Use To Manage the Makerspace
This is a list of tools we have considered and decided for some reason to not use. We don't mean to say that these are not excellent tools in their own right. We don't mean to discourage you from using these in your own projects or teams. But not everyone in our domain is technical enough to handle a dozen tools that do essentially the same thing but in slightly different ways. For these reasons we are cautious before introducing a new tool to our entire staff and membership.
We specifically avoid the use of desktop files that are emailed to each other. If you've ever done this before, and who hasn't, you know how easy it is for those to get out of sync and suddenly no one knows who has the latest version - and sometimes the document forks and you have a mess on your hands.
BaseCamp
We tried BaseCamp but found that it did not add a lot of value. It had poor integration with G-Drive. It hid too much information from users.
Asana
It is only free for 10 users. We need tools that can be used by the entire organization for free - or very, very, very low cost.
One Drive
We want to limit our toolset and One Drive duplicates GDrive.
Drop Box
We want to limit our toolset and Drop Box duplicates GDrive.
Microsoft Office
We have GSuite from Google for free to all members. We want all our documents in native GDoc formats for easy collaboration. If you originate a document in a Microsoft format, please import it to a native GDoc format when you add it to our GDrive.