User:Christopher Thomas/How Do I Shop Captain

Shop captains are members of the Make Nashville team who provide an extremely valuable service to our members. This document is an opinion piece describing a shop captain's goals and duties as I see them, based on my experiences volunteering elsewhere in the past. This is not an official Make Nashville document.

Your Mandate

 

Your mandate as a shop captain is to make sure members can use the facilities of your shop.

That's why you're here. Everything else that you do is to support that goal.

Your Duties

 

• Make sure that the equipment in your shop is in working order.

Having existing tools working is more important than getting new tools. Having a mediocre tool that works reliably is more important than having a wonderful tool that's one repair away from working. A tool that can't be used does not serve your mandate.

• Hold classes regularly on using the equipment in your shop.

This should be done at least every two months; preferably more often. If members can't get trained on your tools, the tools aren't useful.

• Make it easy for members to find any information they need.

At minimum, the slack channel banner should say who the shop captain is, and there should be a pinned post repeating that information and linking to the eventbrite page for courses. Ideally also make wiki pages (and link to them from the pinned post).

General Advice

 

• If people ask "how can I get trained on (tool)", have an answer. If the answer is "talk to (person)", it means there needs to instead be a course run by (person). If the answer is "there will be a course eventually", it means there needs to be a course put up on eventbrite now.

• Ask permission to photograph peoples' work and then post their projects in the slack channel. People love to show off cool projects they've done and people love being inspired by other peoples' cool projects - but nobody will post these on their own. Doing it for them goes a long way.

• Be in the space regularly if you can, especially on open house night, so that you can show visitors cool things that people have made using the tools in your shop, and give them tours of the shop so that they can see how they might do similar things. If possible, have a business card with a nice project photo, the slack link, and the eventbrite course link on it to hand out to visitors.

• Delegate. If anyone offers to help, and that help would be at all useful - give them something to do. If there's something that needs to be done that someone else could help with - ask them if they're willing to do it. There's no shortage of things that should be done, and you probably can't do all of them.

Being a shop captain, deputy, or any other volunteer with similar duties is a lot of work, but can be a very rewarding experience. Good luck!