Talk:Free Geek Space Usage - Revision history

MichaelWestwind: Reverted edits by OruQ5h (Talk); changed back to last version by Rfs

2007-04-10T18:43:20Z

Reverted edits by OruQ5h (Talk); changed back to last version by Rfs

OruQ5h at 18:38, 10 April 2007

2007-04-10T18:38:50Z

Rfs at 16:50, 13 December 2006

2006-12-13T16:50:36Z

Halfasspete: agreement...kudos

2005-04-11T05:55:21Z

agreement...kudos

Shawn: name!

2005-03-14T00:15:22Z

name!

192.168.1.3 at 03:08, 13 March 2005

2005-03-13T03:08:01Z

New page

Reasoning, and Rant:

When Jhasen moved around the benches in recycling to make everything a
little easier to access, he did so from the knowledge of how recycling
works. He watched how people went about recycling, and then he tweaked it
continually. Within FreeGeek there are an almost infinite number of
processes going on continuously, and the best use of the building space
of FreeGeek will come out of the collective knowledge of as many of the
people who use the space as can be involved. The more people working on
the design plans, the more likely the building will be allocated in such
a way that the space is all used well.

Yet the process of allocation of space in the building remains opaque. As
one of the most difficult and important things to making the FreeGeek
Consensus Process work well is transparency, I look for things that
remain opaque. A good guide to finding them is finding people
complaining about things, because they feel marginalized by a process
that affects them but that they cannot understand how to ameliorate. The
latest on my list of such things is the organization of the building.
Staff say that the Action committee is now in charge of that, but even
there it's not purely clear. And there remain frequent complaints that
large scale decisions just happen without a clear process for involving
the voices that should be involved.

A few trivial examples:

1. When Collab started, we heard the rumor that the office that we took
over was going to be used for someone else's office, and so we strung
wire and squatted. Because no one had a good idea of how to make a
request to use the space that would be considered seriously, and not just
dictated, we figured that if we were in there using it, it would be ours.
There was, as will be shown, a better choice. But there was no way to
find it at the time, because it wasn't at all clear how to go about
deciding such things.

2. The old server room is going to move out in the coming months. I no
longer have any idea what it will be used for, and I'm fairly sure the
many ideas of what it could be used for aren't being heard. Someday the
White Hole area will become available, and the dream from long ago was an
internet cafe. In neither of these cases will brilliant ideas that
astound and surprise us in a good way appear from the current opaque
process.

Before I show the big example, let me state that the major problem is
that these rumors are counterproductive. The lack of transparency is a
detriment to the community feeling of FreeGeek. All together, we can
probably come up with a fabulous use of the space, whereas a few people
alone making the decisions will lack the fundamental understanding of the
way it gets used that the mass of users have.

The big one, is the classroom. We needed a new classroom, as the lab has
many problems when teaching classrooms. Those problems include that it is
at the center of a noisy traffic corridor, so it is both very loud and
very trafficked, classes resulting in either a partial mobility loss of
FreeGeek or lots of student distraction. While it was a reasonably
flexible space at the time, more flexibility could have helped too.

Then, suddenly, the new classroom was built. I was unaware at the time of
the decisionmaking process for building the new classroom, so I won't
comment on it, but I will say the decisionmaking process was clearly not
fabulous, as it failed at its mission. The new classroom, while less
trafficked, is still functionally a traffic corridor, and the
replacement of the noise is the large, somewhat unfriendly space to teach
in. The flexibility has gone up, somewhat, but the size of the space is
daunting. The rumored movable walls to make the space small enough to be
comfortable have been replaced by bookshelves that, when in place, serve
as nothing but a roadblock to entrance. And the second half of the
classroom, the stage area, is currently inefficiently used. The
expectations of using the space as a venue have not materialized, and it
frequently lies dormant.

All of this could have been predicted by a group of teachers used to
FreeGeek. A better design could have been found that still had a stage,
still had flexibility, and was comfortable. Let me show you what it might
have looked like:

Move the stage to where the doors into the classroom currently are. Move
those doors to where Tech Support was. Behind the stage, put two large
rooms -- the current, planned storage room, and a large room originally
for Collab, now for the White Hole/Server Eval. Doors at the end of that
into the Conference room, and into the classroom. Because we rarely use
both the conference room and the classroom at the same time, the effect
of the traffic corridor to the store/office would have been diminished,
the classroom would have been cozier, and we would have had a large,
usable space behind the stage. What would we have lost? The gigantic,
cavernous event space which we rarely use, and which is frequently mocked
as the least used space in FreeGeek. The classroom would still have been
usable as event space for lectures (just smaller ones than the ones we've
never had), the classroom+conference room+White Hole would have still
been usable as dance space for our parties, just slightly more split up.
And the space that's currently the lab wouldn't have been segmented into
barely usable little corners, but could have been
redesigned into a usable space.

Of course, with many other people contributing to the ideas, we might
have come up with this long ago, and we might have come up with
something even better. Now, though, the construction has largely been
done and changing it to the above vision is an unrealistic budget
expense. So we're somewhat stuck with a space that's not very
comfortable.

I'd really like us to do better with the future decisions on space
allocation. I'd even like to find a way to rescue the classroom from what
I feel is a poor use of space.

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:50, 13 December 2006
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	For what it's worth, I agree 100% with everything you say. It seems logical that, in the absence of transparency, individual assertion of project groups (like the squatting you mentioned) would become an effective, and yet undesirable, option. As a relative newcomer, I would have to say that most of the frustrations I have with FreeGeek probably boil down to a lack of transparency (I would have said, a lack of consensus about how certain decisions are made...but I think it's the same thing.) I am very encouraged to see you putting so much thought into this issue, and bringing it to the attention of council in a concise and manageable form.		For what it's worth, I agree 100% with everything you say. It seems logical that, in the absence of transparency, individual assertion of project groups (like the squatting you mentioned) would become an effective, and yet undesirable, option. As a relative newcomer, I would have to say that most of the frustrations I have with FreeGeek probably boil down to a lack of transparency (I would have said, a lack of consensus about how certain decisions are made...but I think it's the same thing.) I am very encouraged to see you putting so much thought into this issue, and bringing it to the attention of council in a concise and manageable form.
	--[[User:Halfasspete\|Pete]] 22:55, 10 Apr 2005 (PDT)		--[[User:Halfasspete\|Pete]] 22:55, 10 Apr 2005 (PDT)
		+
		+	[[Zoning Proposal]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:55, 11 April 2005
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	- Jeff Schwaber		- Jeff Schwaber
		+
		+
		+	For what it's worth, I agree 100% with everything you say. It seems logical that, in the absence of transparency, individual assertion of project groups (like the squatting you mentioned) would become an effective, and yet undesirable, option. As a relative newcomer, I would have to say that most of the frustrations I have with FreeGeek probably boil down to a lack of transparency (I would have said, a lack of consensus about how certain decisions are made...but I think it's the same thing.) I am very encouraged to see you putting so much thought into this issue, and bringing it to the attention of council in a concise and manageable form.
		+	--[[User:Halfasspete\|Pete]] 22:55, 10 Apr 2005 (PDT)

← Older revision		Revision as of 00:15, 14 March 2005
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	allocation. I'd even like to find a way to rescue the classroom from what		allocation. I'd even like to find a way to rescue the classroom from what
	I feel is a poor use of space.		I feel is a poor use of space.
		+
		+	- Jeff Schwaber

@@ Line 87: / Line 87: @@
 as the least used space in FreeGeek. The classroom would still have been
 usable as event space for lectures (just smaller ones than the ones we've
-never had), the classroom conference room White Hole would have still
+never had), the classroom+conference room+White Hole would have still
 been usable as dance space for our parties, just slightly more split up.
 And the space that's currently the lab wouldn't have been segmented into