[hackerspaces] Circuits lab organization and parts retention for noobs

[dosman]

God help you ;-).

The “dead pile” with a count-down date to disposal has been working for us too for exactly the same reasons.

When sorting it works well when two people on opposite ends of the hoarding spectrum work together. You need someone who can tell what will actually get reused and another person who is fearless in throwing stuff out. Assuming these two folks don’t end up in a fist-fight by the end you should have a successful sorting session ;-).


> On Mar 18, 2015, at 3:45 PM, justin corwin <outlawpoet at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> One of the more successful policies at crashspace has been making 'dead piles' in the front room. We put marginal stuff on display, and give a countdown for when it's going away. People who have strong feelings about a particular bit can always save it, but usually they confine themselves to picking one or two things to put back, so we still manage to recycle/trash a fair amount, but nobody feels bad because they all had a shot to save thing they felt strongly about. 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Joshua Pritt <ramgarden at gmail.com <mailto:ramgarden at gmail.com>> wrote:
> All makerspaces tend to have the packrat tendencies on what to keep vs throw out / recycle.  Depending on how much space you have for parts / hackables storage would be the main factor.  If you have a lot of shelves you might use several banker boxes to keep the bigger things sorted like "hard drives", "5V wall power supplies", "junk cables", "Power cables", "USB cables", etc.  Then for the smaller things like individual resistors and diodes it is very helpful to purchase or ask for a donated organizer like this one: 
> http://goo.gl/J6uYIO <http://goo.gl/J6uYIO>
> 
> I've never heard of any specific rules or ways to scientifically determine what to keep vs throw away / recycle since there's always that, "someone might be able to use this on a project" mentality that is very much in line with just plain pack-ratism.
> 
> I hope this helps (you probably already knew all this)!
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Shirley Hicks <shirley at velochicdesign.com <mailto:shirley at velochicdesign.com>> wrote:
> Good afternoon everyone,
> 
> The Red Mountain Makers in Birmingham is in the process of organizing and binning parts from donated defunct equipment.
> 
> Do any of you have notes, write-ups or links regarding how to decide what to recycle and what to keep? Any recommendations regarding how much to keep on hand? The person who is organizing the work (me) is a relative noob to lab organization, and those who are parting the stuff out have packrat tendencies. :) Our lab guru who is guiding us has given some general recommendations, but his experience is within a development workplace with far more resources than we currently have.
> 
> By way of example, we have 2 paper box sized bins of SATA drive cables, and a similarly sized box of VGA cables.
> 
> My main concern is managing the supply while we shuffle the space to accommodate renovations. It's all binned and on racks, but isn't clustered beyond like with like (first sort). I have electronics recyclers coming in two days.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Shirley Hicks
> RMM Secretary
> 
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> -- 
> Justin Corwin
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