[UCIMC-Tech] Production room dumping

[Chris Ritzo]

One issue is that of tech donations- if something is donated, like a
printer, people seem to be generally dumping the item into the Production
room, probably because it's a secure room. Whether that person who is
receiving the donated item(s) plans to then inform anyone about where the
item came from and what needs to be done with it seems to not be happening.

Brian Duggan informed me that the Finance group secured the black printer.
However no request has been made for anyone to do anything with it. This is
one example where people are not communicating within the established
channels the IMC uses for dealing with stuff/requests/whatever else. Another
example is the many requests that Brian Duggan receives for desktop support.
While part of his role as an Americorps with a tech focus is to support the
program, in my opinion it is not to provide the type of one-on-one support
that he's been asked to do on many occasions. It should also be noted that
very few of these requests are actually made through the imc-tech list. That
failure to make a standard request to our list both limits the ability of
tech to adequately respond to requests, and it also hides the fact that
Brian's time is being monopolized by Americorps staff requests and support
of specific working groups like IMC Finance.

Don't get me wrong here, I believe time should be devoted to things like
providing remote access and ensuring backups of the finance machine are
happening, the fact is that Brian's time to devote to projects that the Tech
group would like him to work on is being unfairly limited by support
requests that is simply outside the scope of what the Tech group does.

How does this rambling rant relate to the production room issue brought up
by Christina?

One of the things the tech group has done in the past was to vet and receive
tech donations. What happens then when someone comes in and drops off a
totally non-functioning VCR? Does the person receiving them accept it? or do
they contact someone from the tech group? I'm not saying tech needs to be
consulted on every donation, but hey- we don't need more crap lying around
the IMC.

Here's a better use case: a working group secures a new printer to be
donated to the IMC (something we actually need) -- at the very least they
should communicate what's going on to the appropriate lists. In the case of
the printers that have been showing up in the production room this should be
imc-tech and imc-production.

People need to get over not wanting to communicate over email and our
listservs. This is the core communication mechanism that the IMC has used
since its inception.


On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Bob Illyes <illyes at uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Regarding the long email from Kristina about the Production room being used
> for a dumping ground, Print rents 1/4 of the room and  RFU rents about a
> 4th. We both pay market rates for what we use. As the Print and RFU
> Americorps person, Kristina is completely within her rights to take anything
> that's dumped in at least that half  and  put it out into the main space.
>
> Sometime back, Shows was using the room as an equipment dump. Then they got
> an entire room for which, as far as I know, they pay nothing. What group is
> putting this stuff in the room now?
>
> Bob
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