Don't touch the precious things!

Hackerspace globally must be fighting the battle of the accumulation of crap.

One of the many challenges facing the movement is this... the sort of folk who like hackerspaces, like to hoard stuff.... useful stuff.... PRECIOUS stuff.

It's interesting to use a LOTRs example as I think that Mathom is the right term for this stuff. There is a Nottingham word for it too rammel which I prefer.

The essence of a mathom is something with no actual value which is far to precious to throw away. In Hackerspace circles this can literally be almost anything at all. To the intellect of most hackers, who can imagine any number of projects, almost anything "could" be useful.

Personally I think one of the top under rated assets of any hackerspace is the SPACE... it's in the name after all if you call it Hackerspacer, Hackspace or Makerspace. I've been to quite a few UK Hackspaces and I know that the key issue is how the space is used and how it is presented.

One Nottinghack rule I would highlight is No CRTs Thank You in the very early day of Nottinghack we were offered these at a rate of about 1 a week. That 17" monitor you coveted so much in the mid 90's is now worse than junk. It's vacuum chamber and mercury make it the worst kind of hazardous waste! You hackspace taking them, even if you CAN imagine some sort of multi-screen uber project is a BAD idea. Some hackerspaces have a ban on old PCs too. Good idea. I'd say the same about pre Windows XP laptops.

If you consider that most hackspaces have at least 10% of their spaces devoted to these mathoms we can see they are very important and worthy of investment! As they have not often been touch in periods longer than a month or more, it would not be completely illogical to store them elsewhere, say an hours drive from your hackspace.

It's my understanding that there are large and profitable businesses devoted to the storage of crap for a monetary fee... perhaps the procurement of less useful space elsewhere for your mathoms could be considered?

A waste of money? Surely not if these rarely touched precious things aren't important enough to pay to store less time away than they were last touched then it can only make sense to REDUCE your storage cost by moving them elsewhere?