This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 3 (North‐East England)
This CTP relates to the decision made to bring in an employee to handle administration, relieving pressure from the co-founders.
The organisation was initially developed as a voluntary body, building on the ‘maker’ nights run by one of the co-founders across the city. The group began to look for premises, they started to articulate the importance of combining a workshop space with a an area where they could do their day-jobs:
“I had lots of chats with the other organisers about getting space. There were two themes: we had a core group of 5 people who needed to support each other, and we all wanted a shared office space – we knew the benefits of doing it all together”.
As described in other CTPs, the group first took up premises in a small office in 2010 with little space for any of the equipment that they wanted, before moving into the larger premises in summer 2011 which had the “clean” (office) and “dirty” (workshop) space which they needed. As the group grew, the original co-founders continued to handle much of the administrative work themselves, often taking time and focus away from their own businesses to do so.
In 2012 the decision was made to appoint a technician to provide the technical support needed to keep the space running, which alleviated some of the stress. However, the extraneous workload persisted, creating stress for the co-founders who had to undertake it. Work included: setting up and mending machines; answering member and press enquiries; paperwork, including bills; sourcing insurance; creating and managing booking systems for the machines; community support; liasing with external bodies; and codifying practices around behaviour and practices.
In 2015, the decision was made to hire an assistant to relieve the ongoing difficulties. As part of their move to larger premises in 2011, the group had also founded a Community Interest Company (CIC), and this now permitted them to employ someone through that legal structure.
This action acted as a CTP as, by taking pressure away from the other co-founders, it offered them the space and resources to focus on the strategic direction that they wanted the organisation to take; and also permitted a better sense of balance between their voluntary work, their day jobs, and their personal lives.
This CTP was shaped by the formalisation of the group into a company structure in 2011. After initially running out of a ‘small poky’ room, the organisation moved to larger premises and founded a Community Interest Company to give a legal form to their activities. This structuring meant that they were able to hire an employee later down the line.
The CTP was also shaped by the appointment of a technician in 2012, who acted as a ‘trial run’ for a later employee. As described in other CTPs, the business model of the organisation was, in theory, split between hiring out shared hotdesks, and workshop membership. As one of the co-founders described, bringing in someone to support the technical side of the operations was initially folded in under this model:
“We needed more technical help than we could give. Once you’ve got a 3D printer or a lasercutter, even if you train people they always have questions later, ‘Did I do this right?’, ‘Why hasn’t the filament come out? Is it safe? Am I safe?’. We’ve all done it, but you don’t realise how much time it takes up until you look at all the work you haven’t done because someone just comes by – ‘Have you got a moment?’ So we appointed a technician-in-residence, who we knew already: ‘If you’re given a desk and free access to anything, can you take care of some of these support things?’. It was meant to be a 12-month post, but he’s been here for 3 years now, handling the workshop, doing inductions, queries, all of that”.
As this quote indicates, the involvement of the first technician highlighted to the group that there was substantially more work involved in the day-to-day operations than they had initially anticipated; an issue which became apparent through the move to larger premises. The increased size of the new premises created more complex management issues than had been expected.
This CTP was shaped by the formalisation of the group into a company structure in 2011; the initial involvement of a technician; and the move to larger premises.
The organisers reported no conflicts in this CTP, either between each other, or the technicians and assistants brought in to support the organisation. The aim of this CTP was to mediate and reduce the stresses experienced by the organisers who had been giving considerable amounts of their personal time, often at the expense of their own day jobs and personal lives (as documented in other CTPs).
As described in part in other CTPs, the organisers were aware of the stressors that had been accruing in the run-up to the decision to bring in extra staff. These issues extended beyond the limits around the organisation’s business model at that time, to the extent where the organisers took more desks in the space than they otherwise might have done (“J has taken a side-office to lock himself away in; my own company has booked up several desks here”). However, the organisers felt constrained in their ability to act because, although they were aware there was a problem, they found it difficult to articulate exactly what could be done to solve that problem, as one organiser described:
“For the organisation to succeed, it needed to be able to support the businesses in there, but it was doing the opposite. We couldn’t figure out a way around that. We had people saying that they’d volunteer which was great, but we weren’t good at describing the type of help we needed, so it went no-where. It was really frustrating, we knew we had all that help at our fingertips if we wanted it but what are you going to do with it?”
The necessity of the support offered by both the technician-in-residence and the hired administrator was unexpected to the organisers. As mentioned above, the technician role was originally intended to be a 12-month post but ended up turning into a long-term position. Similarly, the administrator’s role was initially anticipated to be small and well-defined, but transformed into something larger and more complex – “The original job description was around admin, like dealing with invoicing, but now he does so much more than that”, taking on roles including sourcing a third, new, larger venue for the organisation in 2016; and dealing with day-to-day issues around broken machines, systems management, and community behaviour.
In the absence of this CTP, the workload on the organisers would have likely increased, creating personal and professional stressors for them. The organisation itself would also likely have slowed in its growth and support of members.
This CTP supported the transformational aims of the organisation, inasmuch as it provided the resources to be able to improve and grow the technology community and the capacity of ‘making’ in Liverpool through the resources offered; in particular through the workshop. It also allied with the organisors’ ideological stance on rejecting public funding (as described in other CTPs), instead making the space self-sustaining through its own revenue stream and volunteer help. As one co-founder described, “Everything we’ve done here has been bootstrapped – even when we’ve been offered resources, we’ve turned it all down”.
The CTP has also been bound up with how the organisation has learnt to develop, document, and share its technical projects, through GitHub. GitHub is an online repository hosting service, offering distributed version control and source code management functionality; and is the largest host of open source code in the world. The service was developed to support collaborative technical project management, containing tools including task management, bug tracking, and wikis.
The organisation had made use of its services to document the projects developed by members, comprising things including internet-connected devices and other complex electronics. However, it also made use of the project management tools to codify elements of the organisation’s systems and structures (eg. Hosting the organisation Handbook). When the administrative assistant S was hired, the group made use of GitHub to post tasks and queries into a dedicated repository where S could be tagged and have tasks assigned to him by the organisers. The tagging system, which had been used in technical projects, also allowed organisers to differentiate between the importance of different tasks (which, as above, had been difficult for them to articulate previously) – through labels based on song lyrics including ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’, ‘The Time Is Now’ (ie. Urgent), and ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ (ie. Useful, but not necessary). Through these systems, the organisers learnt how to identify and manage the different project management tasks needed for the effective running of the company, and how best to assign them to their employee.
The long term consequences of this CTP include the smoother running of the organisation, and the ability to move more quickly through urgent decisions than might have been possible otherwise. These included premises – in the subsequent months after the interviews, the organisation began to explore a move to new larger workshop space to allow them to expand and lay down strategies for the coming years; and the bulk of this work fell to the administrative assistant.
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