On Mon, 11/05/2012 08:39 AM, Pete Prodoehl <raster@gmail.com> wrote:
> What do other spaces do for storage? Bins? Shelves? Lockers? Rolling 

i3Detroit has giant shelves, built up to the 12-foot ceiling. Access to the upper shelves is by ladder or aerial work platform (Genie Runabout). I believe there are seventysome spaces, all told.
The face of each shelf has a strip of whiteboard glued along it, where members can label their spaces. On the 32x48-inch shelves, a space is half a shelf, or 32x24. On the 48x48-inch shelves, a space is a quarter shelf, or 24x24. What you do with items in your space is up to you; most folks have a plastic bin, some just place loose items there. Neighbors across from each other can negotiate to store longer items, etc. 
That all works pretty well, except for the scarcity of open spaces, due to the following breakdowns:
1: Roughly a third of the spaces at any given time are occupied by members who aren't paying dues. Maybe they've left, maybe they've just missed a few months in a row, with 60-plus members there's a fair bit of turnover and nobody's quite sure. Eviction is awkward due to respect for someone's stuff, difficulty of contacting certain members, etc.
2: Roughly another third of the spaces at any given time are occupied by stuff with no member named on the whiteboard strip, an illegible or useless label, or otherwise in an indeterminate status. Again, cleaning these is harder than it should be.
3: A few members persistently occupy multiple spaces. This is an internal political problem and not a failure of the storage system, but I figured I'd mention it here for completeness.
4: Items get left leaning against the shelves, unlabeled and obstructing Genie travel into the aisle. Since schlepping a full container up a ladder to a top shelf isn't exactly safe, it's considered critical that the Genie be able to reach the units. Simply pitching these items into the dumpster and posting photos seems to work pretty well.
I've been pursuing a few modest and not-so-modest changes to help members use storage more thoughtfully:
1. A space-wide "Name, Date, Contact Info, Permissions" poster campaign, emphasizing the critical information that must be on everything. A few ancillary slogans, like "Legibility: If we can't read it, we can't heed it!" and "Unlabeled = unloved" are popping into my head as I write this. Trouble is, anything I make in Inkscape comes out looking like a bad Powerpoint and has no visual appeal whatsoever. Help?!
2. Renaming "member storage" to "short-term storage", emphasizing that this is not your personal Shurgard. If items untouched for >3 months were simply taken home, there'd be no overcrowding problem whatsoever.
3. Charging a tiny symbolic amount for storage. Place "registration tags" in the vending machine for a nickel or something, and change the color of the tag every month. Simply requiring that people touch their storage once in a while would help a lot, I think.
4. Charging a reasonable amount for storage. As above, but five bucks. It really is a finite resource that has value, why not? 
(Since we have a two-tier membership structure anyway, bundling a free storage space or two with the higher tier (which has few other differentiating factors and little perceived value these days) might make sense too. Again, that's a whole different matter of policy but I figured I'd mention it, ancillary to the present topic.)
Outside all this, there's "large project" space, which has the parking permit system described elsewhere. Everyone understands that there isn't enough floor space for everyone to have something stored there, so this actually works reasonably well. Although a number of people seem to think that merely laying an incomplete permit across their junk will somehow ward off the graveyard spirits, a gentle reintroduction to the concept of sharing usually deals neatly with that.
-Nate-