[Spacecadets] Rearranging at Quelab

[drew at hardcorp.io]

On 2016-03-05 04:08, John Benedetto wrote:
> However, I can also see WHY someone
> moved it, since Darren & I haven't been able to make significant
> progress on reducing the backlog.  However, this is not dealing with
> the problem, only moving it...

Stuff was packed and piled up in the donations area such that the only 
way to get to much of it was to climb on/over it and dig down into it. 
That made it impractical for members to find things in it. With the 
stuff spread out along a wall in the south space, it's much easier for 
members to find things in it, which makes it more likely that things 
will actually be used instead of just piling up, and that will help 
reduce the backlog.

> it all STILL needs processed & dealt
> with, and any semblance of order we had is now lost.

Sometimes things are donated from people or companies who want receipts 
for tax purposes, and these things obviously need to be left alone until 
the donations officer can inventory them. But that didn't apply to any 
of the things in the donations zone yesterday, and the donations officer 
doesn't need to inventory donations for which receipts aren't requested 
since Quelab doesn't maintain an inventory of what's here. As I 
understand, everything else is available for members to use for 
tasks/projects throughout Quelab (though not for removal from Quelab 
without approval). Is that correct? If so, then what other processing 
needs to be done?

Probably some of it needs to go in the dumpster, and some of it needs to 
be sold. But that can apply not only to newly-donated stuff, but also to 
stuff that's been at Quelab for years. To deal with that, members should 
be able to tag things in Quelab, both in the donations pile and 
everywhere else, as proposed-to-dump or proposed-to-sell, and at the 
next monthly meeting, all the members who show up get to vote on dumping 
and selling the tagged things. Having the donations pile spread out and 
accessible facilitates this process.

In any case, we had a deadline for clearing space for the welding class. 
The outside storage area was packed (even after we moved a bunch of wood 
and a giant desk out of it, there was still no room for welding), and 
the clean-out planned for Saturday morning would have been too late for 
the welding class. The weeks or months the board would have needed to 
resolve the donations pile problem would have made that too late too, 
since the welding class was only a few hours away. Our course of action 
seemed most practical; sorry if we offended anyone.