It was raised in the AGM that a formal team for visual arts would be beneficial. Workshop teams in metal and woody already exist and manage training, equipment maintenance, workshop development, and may soon have some budgetary responsibility.
Conversation tends to take place on dedicated Telegram team groups, and the teams usually meet online once a quarter (roughly) to discuss matters.
I personally don’t have time to be on a visual arts team, but have started this thread to get the ball rolling. I can also provide advice and answer questions about how the metal and wood teams work.
All that needs to happen is for 4/5 interested people to put their hands up. The floor is yours.
Is this potentially a classic “catagory mistake” I can see how a woodworking team may be concerned with the tools which work on wood and the metalwork team work on metal. But it appears that the visual arts team is to be formed to work on what is in the area defined as the visual arts area rather than actual visual arts. The reason I bring this up is that I am interested in visual arts and if I joined the group and it was not concerned with visual arts I may be a little disappointed.
I’ve experience with 3D printing and an interest in lasers, sewing, general crafts, and macs Happy to get involved if the group’ll tolerate me having to get acquainted with some of the tools?
Thanks for volunteering. Are you quite new to the space? Right now we have some people who deliver training on those tools, but there’s no cohesive visual arts “team” as I understand it. If you’re happy to be on the team, I’m sure the existing members who are active in that area would be happy to have you.
I’m gonna tag @Harvinder_Atwal@jklmuk@FoodNoTear because I believe all of you deliver training in this area, right? Also @Josephxtian who recently posted about the sewing machines. There’s probably others I’m missing.
If you like, you can try and corral people into a team. That would make you the de-facto ‘secretary’ of the team, running a Telegram group, arranging meetings, keeping on top of tasks etc. Is that something you’d be prepared to do?
The teams should all have a board member on, but this is more as a liaison rather than a highly active team member, so they can probably provide some guidance.
I’d like to address this as I’m not sure how the current model from other areas in hacman will fit into a visual arts team.
We have a mix of equipment that are not natural progressions from one to the other. For example in wood working training starts with bandsaws and “upgrades” to tables saws, etc as you get more proficient and want to make crafting easier.
This is not the case in visual arts. We have seperate machines that don’t cross over in terms of skills or even desires hence I think you will have issues trying to form one team across all that equipment. i.e. I like 3d printing/lasers but don’t have much desire for sewing. So I feel if I joined a visual arts team as a trainer I would be responsible for all of that.
I would recommend to promote equipment area teams in visual arts and if needed one or two representives that oversee all of visual arts from an admin level.
Also another problem is that some teams are very much embedded with their own ways of delivering training/maintaining equipment so probably don’t see the benefit of joining a larger team. As in it’s not broken why fix it?
Absolutely understand where you’re coming from. To be honest, I’ve not been trained on any of the equipment in VA so don’t have great insight.
Essentially this is a bureaucratic point. A theoretical VA team would just oversee training, maintenance, and general good-functioning of that space. It’s not the case that all members would need to deliver training on all (or any) particular tool. In woody for example, we share the burden for training, maintenance, admin, workshop upgrades, etc.
The existence of a VA team would also mean that the area had better liaison with the board when allocating funding. And it would help the space standardise some of the paperwork related to training across the space. Right now, for example, there’s no clear line of communication between the wood team (where training requires signatures on paper) and the laser team (not sure how training works). And if we’re to tidy up our governance with a view to potential funding down the line, we should look at standardising this.
There may be a question of how granular we go with teams.
It is absolutely true that Visual Arts is a mixed bag of equipment and specialities, but (at present) it all shares the same physical space and therefore I see value in a cross-specialty team for matters relating to the layout, organisation and tidiness of “Visual Arts” overall.
With respect to training, I agree that should remain the purview of the specialised teams we currently have (those marks as “trainers” in the membership system).
For the bureaucratic type purposes of coordinating documentation re: maintenance logs, maintenance guides, training guides, risk assessments, etc. That is something that could become the responsibility of the wider team, coordinating with relevant maintainers as required.
We might want to consider each specialisation in turn and determine whether there’s enough volunteer interest to formalise a dedicated team for each, or whether we roll that up into a wider “catch all” team?
Of course, the separation or absorption of teams can happen as the space & its membership grows or shrinks.
Happy to get involved if the group’ll tolerate me having to get acquainted with some of the tools?