March is Safety Month

Hello Makers. Our quarterly member meeting will be Saturday March 24th from 6-7pm at the makerspace. We wanted to dedicate this month’s quarterly meeting to a safety standdown. We have some business, but first up will be brainstorming about what we can do to make our space as safe as possible. All of your leaders have been doing homework leading up to this. We’ve consulted with experienced members of the community for guidance and have already started making changes based on that advice. For example thanks to David Springs, all of our fire extinguishers were serviced and given renewed inspection tags. We’ve been posting safety-based questions all month at talk.makeict.org for you to answer, and there’s a survey for anonymous feedback about your experiences around safety. Finally, we appointed Mike Barushok, long time member, leader, and wikibrarian, to be our safety committee lead. You can contact him at mikeb@makeict.org with questions or concerns.

Since the meeting is right around dinner time, let’s all go in on pizza? $5 per person. Profits will benefit the equipment fund, which is currently working on getting us a burnout oven for the jewelry area! https://goo.gl/forms/aqbtvgYoLbJ95GCH3

Call for Makers

Planning for Wichita’s Mini MakerFaire is well underway and we hope you’re planning to be there too! Now is the time to fill out your application. Mini MakerFaire will be the weekend of July 21-22 at Exploration Place. To reserve your table and show of your maker skills fill out the call for makers applicationor contact info@makerfairewichita.com

Focus on Education

Did you know that MakeICT teaches at least five classes a week? With everything we teach, I wanted to take some time to sit down and talk about opportunities to improve, measure and focus on our educational program.

First, there’s a survey running about your favorite classes at MakeICT, and asking you for feedback on how we can improve: https://goo.gl/forms/HQrWoajtUsJlcuKh2

Second, you’re all invited to our education program town hall meeting on Monday April 2 at 7pm. We’ll talk about success, share ideas for improvement, and make sure our classes are the best. If you have a friend who’s a teacher or educator, this would be a great thing to invite them to. Click here for the facebook event.

Third, as always if you’d like to teach a class our teach a class form does a great job leading you through the requirements. Share what you know!

Proposed bylaws change for officer terms

Currently the MakeICT board of directors is elected every June. Every seat is up for election, so every year we could have a whole new board. This is very unique for a non-profit organization. We love fresh energy and uniqueness, but as our organization grows, serving on the board comes with a big learning curve. I know as president I barely had my feet under me for the first 3-4 months. I’m now starting to feel like I know the board and my job a lot better, but guess what, three months until it’s a new election.

So we’d like to grant the next board a sense of stability and offer up a structure with at least two year terms. Rather than vote for a potentially whole new board every year, you’ll vote for half the officers every year, with the other half staying around to bring them up to speed. It’s a small change, but one that will grant us a lot of stability.

This change to our bylaws will be presented at the quarterly meeting on the 24th and voted on electronically by the eligible members. You can weigh in with your thoughts ahead of time here in the forum.

Laser Cutter Fundraising Update

Thank you MakeICT members for getting us to a place where we could order our second laser cutter! Last month I told you our budget was $2000 short of the full cost, this month our pledges and fundraising have us there. If you pledged, please go ahead and make your donation. You can either bring it to the makerspace or use the laser cutter fundraising button at makeict.org/donate. Our laser cutter will be on a boat for a while so stay tuned for news about its setup and availability. If you didn’t pledge and would still like to donate, we’d really appreciate it. The full cost of the laser is over $5000, so if we keep fundraising up to that, we can re-allocate that budgeted money for other equipment. Thank you so much!