[hackerspaces] What do you do in open tuesdays?

[matt]

NYCR does a pretty open format on their open night on thursdays... people
are invited in to work on stuff.  We occasionally get first timers through
who don't have a project to work on, and a member will usually give them a
tour and let em know what the open night and the space is all about.

However, in distant past times, I helped run a thing called Make:NYC... and
what we did is just invite people together for make related activities.  We
started with tutorials and mini projects, but torward the end we settled on
team challenges.  Let people break down into teams and try to accomplish a
goal in like a three hour span.

Stuff like build a bridge out of balsa wood, but more creative.  I remember
one where we got cheap RC blimps and told people to try and use them to
move a weight.  We didn't even know if it was possible.  And teams came up
with some incredible solutions.  Other ones like... build a throwing arm to
throw a payload.  Simple stuff.  Plan, execute, laugh as everything fails
spectacularly.  Some nights no one succeeded other nights everyone did.
That format seemed pretty beloved by a regular crowd of attendees.

Just some thoughts.

-Matt


On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Bill Shaw <toppsoft at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
>> From: Florencia Edwards <floev22 at gmail.com>
>> To: discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
>> Cc:
>>
>> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:38:20 -0300
>> Subject: [hackerspaces] What do you do in open tuesdays?
>>
>> What sort of activities do you do in open tuedays? Is it with members
>> and.not members meeting and talking? We are having a open tuesday soon and
>> people ( and i admit, me too) dont understand what it is about , its
>> abstract. We just say our doors are open everyone is welcome. But what sort
>> of activities do you usually do on open tuesdays? Like a meeting where
>> people.introduce themselves and say what they hack?
>> Id love some examples
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> We originally started by doing introductions and giving everyone a chance
> to introduce themselves and talking about our goals and mission. After
> about a month, it got tedious to hear the same things over and over so we
> transitioned to scheduling a class to coincide with the open night and
> moved from there to occasional workshops.
>
> We look at these as community building evenings. They give visitors a
> chance to meet lots of members at once and we often have working groups
> meeting to move projects forward so everyone can see what is going on
> within the group.
>
> Besides that, we have started monthly member meetings just before our Open
> Make Night for members to hear of the status of the organization and to
> allow them to present and pitch projects.
>
> We're still playing with the format. Classes were troublesome only because
> our space is one large room and competing conversations took away from
> them. We recently acquired some moveable partitions so the workshops were a
> good substitute since they were more participative and less structured.
>
> Bill Shaw
> Tampa Hackerspace
>
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