This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 4 (East England)
This CTP refers to the decision made to implement two-stage verification around membership and misbehavior, as a means of community protection around the makespace premises. When planning how the organization would be structured, the co-founders were clear from the beginning that they wanted to:
“…build community as a set of phrases – we knew that was very important from the start. We wanted [the space] to be inclusive; we wanted everyone to be able to come and make, irregardless of gender, whether they were textiles people or not”.
Prior to obtaining premises, the co-founders held a series of meetings with the founder members (as described in CTP1), where they developed a series of community principles. Some of these principles covered the ‘structural’ elements of running a machine shop, such as allocating ‘ownership’ of certain machines to different people who took on the responsibility to maintain them. Other principles covered social and cultural norms, such as respecting all members of the space, regardless of which skill level they were at. The community guidelines were intentionally in place before the space opened.
As described in CTP2 and CTP4, the makespace obtained premises in September 2012, and spent the first few months until March 2013 “kitting and fitting”. Founder members alone had access to the space during this period, before it was opened to members of the public, with membership at £40 per month. All members are required to undertake induction, during which they receive a keyfob for the space, but it does not become active until they email in a security code. The purpose of this is to create a two-fold verification. Firstly, the mail requires new members to self-verify by providing a mailing address. Secondly, directors are able to ban anyone that they meet in induction, prior to full membership being awarded – but do not have to do so face-to-face:
“The way that we’re structured is that the inductor who brings in each new cohort can ban anyone they don’t feel comfortable with. Part of that means that it doesn’t happen on the day. On the day of induction, if you have a bad feeling about someone who’s there, you don’t have to say anything to them – you just don’t have to activate their keyfob later on. We designed this intentionally so that if an individual feels threatened or uncomfortable, they don’t have to have that conversation. It’s a form of two-stage verification”.
The principle that anyone can be banned from the makerspace by a director with no reason given is written into the community guidelines
This CTP has also been shaped by the expansion of the makespace, from 3 initial founder members, to the current membership of 290 (at the time of interview). When the space first opened, inductions were initially only delivered by the directors – as membership grew (in line with expected numbers), this task was expanded out to a “very small group of trusted people”. Formalising verification processes allowed a common quality assurance structure across the organization, whilst protecting members from difficult encounters: “It’s like training the trainers – we need to trust the inductors to apply that filter, and to be able to say ‘Not you’”.
The CTP has also been shaped by keeping the trainers’ pool intentionally small to minimize risk, as the decisions to ban has to sometimes be made on quite an instinctual and subjective basis, as one of the co-founders explained:
“Before you come for induction, you should read the wiki…but people show up and some of them haven’t even realized that they have to clean up. That’s the biggest risk when you’re going through an induction and someone says ‘Wow, I have to clean up and I might have to look after some equipment.’ You have to make a call with that – are you really ok with it, or are they just trying to appease you because you’re doing induction?”
Finally, the CTP has also been shaped and scaffolded by the flexible use of specific technologies – payment systems, photos:
“The payment system only takes credit cards, so you have to have already have jumped through a hoop to get a card. Part of this to validate that people are people-y people. We have made efforts to accommodate other things – we have one homeless member who’s being sponsored by a local company, and had people vouching for him. He was a known quantity, and we were happy to make that sort of accommodation. But for other members we need a credit card and a mailing address – we need to know that you’re suitably real. We take photos at induction – they don’t get used for anything else, but in theory if there’s a problem we know what people look like and we can correlate that to a mailing address”.
Whilst the two-step verification has never had to be used in practice, co-founders described how the policy created an active presence in itself through the possibility that it affords – “It’s been important for [members] to feel confident”. Instead, the co-founders and directors have felt empowered to have difficult conversations with a number of members through the culture of safety and report that the CTPP engenders. This has included members who were the subject of complaints about bad language (“We sat them down and said, ‘If you’re saying that because you’ve hit your thumb with a hammer, that’s fine, but…”); and someone who, in the first few weeks of their membership slept overnight in the space, and were “given a stern talking to – it was fine and he stepped up his game”.
This CTP was defined by events including: the makespace taking on physical premises, and expanding membership numbers.
This CTP was intentionally created to mediate and overcome tensions within the makespace. Whilst a number of members have been asked to leave and/or change their behavior within the space (as described above), the co-founders did not report any specific frictions or difficulties with these issues.
This CTP was anticipated as being critical from the start, as it formed a cornerstone of the makespace’s policies around accessibility:
“Inclusivity was important from the start – we wanted anyone to be able to come and make stuff”. The
CTP has acted as its own form of living document, as the co-founders have learnt and adapted around it, accommodating differences between members and working with specific infrastructures (eg. Of payment systems) to back up their work. The CTP has also not been a perfect predictor of who needs to be banned – as the co-directors explained, some people had slipped through the verification:
“One member was barred within his first week. It was nothing big – his induction wasn’t super-confident but we thought, we’ll give him a go. But we didn’t have confidence that he was telling us the truth about simple things like his name. This guy was inconsistent about his name – and, after a week, we had some questions about how things were. Two of the directors had a difficult conversation with him – he acknowledged there was a problem, we walked him off the premises, and de-activated his card”.
In the CTP’s absence, more situations like this may have occurred.
This CTP was part of network formation within the makespace itself between the founder members, through the initial planning meetings; and with new members. The principles helped the organization to achieve its transformative aims of being as accessible as possible, including for existing members by permitting banning without having to have direct contact:
“This is a protective thing – we want to be able to do this at the drop of a hat. We wanted to be able to deal with cases where, if a problem is in any way nuanced, we didn’t want to have to sit someone down and say, ‘It’s because of this’. We wanted to be able to do this if you just have a bad feeling. That’s how to make a safe space – we don’t want you to have to wait for an incident. And we emphasise this in the induction – if you do anything, we can get rid of you”.
This protective element has also been augmented by a wider “reporting culture”, where members can email directors about problems rather than having to speak about them face-to-face. This CTP also allowed the co-founders and members to learn about how social norms and community culture could be constructed in a volunteer-run organization. The co-founders were clear that creating a written set of community principles was an important part of this process, both to have a document to refer back to, and also to codify unseen social elements which might otherwise go unsaid:
“It’s an interesting document because it’s very long. We’ve had people say ‘We don’t need to say that’, but obviously you do when you’ve already had a conversation with someone for whom a particular bit wasn’t obvious”.
Stay informed. Subscribe for project updates by e-mail.
