Forward

here's the location of dump spots in the space: Dump Spots

okay, so

we have a lot of stuff and I ([User:M]) am probably the largest contributor by far, but let's figure out a systemic way to improve our organizational setup such that it's easier to put things away where they're supposed to go (or at least somewhere that's not a flat space) without asking too much of a burden on people (me) such that it doesn't happen.

there's been some talk about inventorying systems: https://bugs.devhack.net/ticket/871

here's my proposal and what we're gonna be trying to work under. at least I am:

The grand organizational system

there are categories of things. namespaces. whatever. these are not recursive/multilevel/heirarchical, there are only one level of categories and then the organization within the category is implementation-defined.

categories don't have to conform to anything other than able to communicate in a sentence or two what belongs in them. categories have a potential to overlap and need to account for that happening.

All categories need a "dump" zone where a person who doesn't know about the category-specific organization can just drop something easily and not worry about it. sometimes the entire categorization scheme can be a dump zone, like stickers or vibes or locksport. easily is an important qualification here, a requirement of doing pretty much anything other than depositing a thing in a location is probably asking for too much. people can be suggested to do further work, like document what they're dumping on the wiki, take a picture of it and drop it in chat with a description of it, talk to a friend about it, or even figure out where it gets further sub-categorized. most important part though is that things have a place to go.

Sometime a category will need further sub-levels, and that's fine. we're not going to be very prescriptive about what a category looks like because this isn't a thing that's expandable to every single thing. Sometimmes a service might pop up to handle categorization of servers, like snipe-it or something. sometimes a spreadsheet will do.

Some examples of subcategorization implementations:

having a bunch of labelled containers next to the dump zone. maybe with instructions about how to find where what you want to put away goes
have a website, service, wiki, spreadsheet to input things to. hopefully with physical hardware near the thing to scan something or print a barcode or something. And a sign that says do not categorize without submitting to website
idk. anything else?

A downside to this whole setup that might crop up is that it's too easy to just dump something into the dump zone and not worry about where it goes. to that, I have to say: we're already doing that but the dump zone is just a flat table.

Categories are also invited to be physically located near eachother and virtually interlink between eachother. I'm not sure if all "(home) hardware things" need to be a single category, but even if they're not they should all be around eachother.

This system also depends on individuals putting in extra labor to categorize things how they need to be, emptying out the dump zones, putting things away. these individuals, these stewards are invited to come up with organization systems that both work for them and work for the people who are interfacing with their systems such that they have to put less work into it.

stewards also need to be aware they may end up moving items into other categories' organizational schemes or dump zones. and should probably communicate so they don't keep flip-flopping forever.

Additionally, there needs to be a space-wide dump zone for things that don't have a category or the categories are unknown. maybe categories spring up from what gets added to this dump zone? unsure.

All of this also doesn't really touch on locating objects. But I believe locating objects goes very hand-in-hand with enabling folks to put things away in places that are intuitive to know where to put away, because looking for a labelled place to put something is very similar to looking for where something is.

Priorities

With the focus on getting rid of clutter in the space, there's definitely areas that we should collectively target to ensure a space that can thrive and provide the resources/tools needed for projects and work as a whole. Here's a few priorities that should be a focus of the space:

Focus on having the most useful and important items available with ease.
- The space before this was very messy, and had lots of junk that made it hard to find what mattered most. By decluttering and focusing on making sure that the most commonly used items are at the ready will result in better workflows.