MN New Member

Overview

Welcome to team Maker Nexus! You have joined us in a great adventure to open a new makerspace on the peninsula. There is so much going on it's often hard for a new member to know where to start. Well, this page is the place. As you come up to speed we're sure you'll have one of those "I wish I'd known this last week" moments. When you do, please either update this page or put a note in the discussion section and another wiki editor will incorporate your idea into this page. We all need to do what we can to help the next person to join us.

Communication Tools

We have several tools that serve different needs. Depending upon your interest you may want to use all or none of these.

email

makernexusbayarea@gmail.com Someone from the steering committee 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.

Slack

Slack is a group chat system. It is for contemporaneous communication. It is organized into "channels". You can read any channel. If you "join" a channel then you will get notifications every time a message is posted there. It can be overwhelming. You can turn off notifications for each channel you join. Some active channels as of March 2018: equipment-acquisition, real-estate, membership, news. If you are away from Slack for a few days, you might have 100 little notes to read; you might want to just skip them and get back into the conversation at the current point.

BaseCamp

BaseCamp is a project management tool. Each project in BaseCamp has its own set of standard tools: chat (campfire), discussion board, to-do lists, calendar, document store. There is one general project called "Maker Nexus HQ" that every member joins. In BaseCamp a person who is in a project invites other people to join the project. We keep a list of projects in the HQ so you can find projects that interest you and post in the HQ chat that you'd like to join. BaseCamp is a quieter place than Slack because the communication is gathered into more threaded topics. The document feature also allows us to organize the library of stuff we are accumulating. Some active teams as of March 2018: Education, Governance, IT, Project Photos.

The Wiki

This wiki is a repository of slowly changing information. Here we try to document more factual things, after they have been hammered out in BaseCamp. 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.

MN Website

The public face of Maker Nexus, the website is the entry portal to our world. It should have current information about the Maker Nexus organization. Only our communication team can change the website.

An Example

As an example of how these all might work... Someone thinks we need a privacy statement (good idea!). On Slack the start a new #privacystmt channel and posts in the #general channel their interest and ask people to join them 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 the Governance project in BaseCamp would be a good home. (They could have decided to start a new BaseCamp project.) They post in the HQ chat and get added to the Governance project. They continue to chat using the Governance project. They create some threaded discussions on what a privacy statement should include and how that might be written. They gather some existing privacy statements from other places on the web. They create a folder in the Documents area and begin assembling a privacy statement. They involve the steering committee, since this policy will need executive approval. Eventually we have a privacy statement we can all support. It's added to this wiki to document it. That new wiki page is locked to prevent random editing. A link to the wiki page is added to the website.

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.

Documents

We do use Google Docs for collaborative document creation. When something needs to be heavily edited, reviewed, and rewritten by a group then Google Docs is the place to do it. We DO NOT send spreadsheets, presentations, or documents around via email for comments. Using email this way causes a complete loss of control and the work is often not collaborative. Please use Google Docs for this kind of work.

When you create a Google Doc, please add it to the appropriate document store in BaseCamp; it's hard to keep track of random Google Docs. Once a document is stable then it should migrate to either a native BaseCamp document or a page in this wiki. If we need to leave the document in Google Docs, then ownership should be transferred to the MakerNexusBayArea Google user.