[Lancaster] Last night's meeting

[Andrew Baxter]

Sorry meant to send this to the list...

On 30/11/12 16:20, Darren Poulson wrote:
> I've just had a bit of a discussion on the main hackspace mailing list
> about health and safety, and most people seem to think its not that
> much of an issue. Maybe a couple of 100 quid a year for public
> liability. Infact, someone mentioned that if we can show ourselves to
> be 'artists', we can get it for 36 quid a year! Basically, because
> theres no actual employees at a hackspace, then you don't have to
> worry about major insurance. Of course we may have to look at content
> insurance and such like, in case of theft. CCTV may have to be
> installed, as well as access cards, etc.

On the subject of CCTV / access cards etc, I was thinking for a bit last 
night about how you ensure some level of security of the equipment in a 
place that's by and for hackers ;-)

One option would be to have a trusted person(s) who looks after that 
side of things - i.e. they keep the physical and virtual keys.

This might be practically the easiest solution, but I was trying to 
think of a way you could get away from this model and have it more 
collective. The best I came up with was that the data from the CCTV and 
the door lock are streamed out on the web, and all members get an app 
which they can run to download the stream. As long as at least 3 members 
are doing this, then if something does go missing, it would be pretty 
hard to take it in such a way that people wouldn't know what had happened.

My thinking does tend to run a bit on the paranoid side, and it's 
probably a bit early to be thinking about stuff like this, but I thought 
I'd throw in my ideas and see what people thought.

Generally, I'd like to see something like this in Lancaster, and I'll 
try to help as and where I can. I don't have that much energy spare in 
my life at the moment, so I don't know how much I can promise in 
practice, but hopefully this will change.

andy