Popular Posts RSSSat, 05 Aug 2023 07:30:56 GMTLast weekend I took the train to London to visit three repair cafés and one makerspace, notebook in hand. Our Utrecht network has been running fix-it days for a while, and I wanted to see what others do differently. The cover photo is from the walk back along the river on Saturday night, tired and very happy.1. A proper triage deskEvery café I visited had one person at the door whose only job was to ask "what's wrong with it?" and send people to the right table. Waiting times were shorter and fixers weren't interrupted mid-repair. We've done this informally until now. From September it becomes a fixed role on our rota.2. Write every repair downOne café logs every item: what it was, what was wrong, and whether it got fixed. After a year they could tell me that toasters and vacuum cleaners make up a third of their visits, and that most "broken" lamps only need a new switch. That tells them which volunteers and spare parts to bring.3. Fixers teach, visitors doWhenever it was safe, the visitor held the screwdriver. People leave having learned something, and they come back as volunteers far more often.4. Safety without fussMains-powered items were tested before going home, and nobody opened a microwave. A few simple rules on the wall, applied to everyone, regulars included.Weekend totals: 3 cafés, 1 makerspace, 63 items seen, 41 fixed, and one very stubborn sewing machine that defeated four people. I'll bring the full notes to our next coordinators' meeting and post a summary in Repair Café Volunteers afterwards.

]]>Sat, 05 Aug 2023 07:30:56 GMTLast Sunday I sat on the porch with a coffee and, for once, no laptop. Mild for the end of January, birds busy in the hedge, a neighbour's wind chime doing its thing. I closed my eyes for what I thought was a minute. It was closer to twenty.I spend most of my working week inside dashboards: activation rates, day-7 retention, how many new members post in their first week. I like numbers and I'll defend them in any meeting. But that morning I noticed how rarely I give my attention to anything that isn't being measured.The thing the chart can't seeA client asked me recently why their retention dipped in January. We pulled every cohort chart we had. The real answer came from a moderator who mentioned, almost in passing, that the member who used to welcome every newcomer had gone quiet over the holidays. No metric tracked her. She was the onboarding flow.That's what I mean by flying too close. Stare at the numbers long enough and you start managing the chart instead of the community.What I'm trying insteadOne morning a week with no dashboards at all. I read member posts in full instead.Every metrics review opens with a single member story before any chart goes up.When a number moves, the first question is "who?" before "why?"The numbers will still be there on Monday. The person quietly holding your community together might not be, if nobody notices them.

]]>Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:32 GMTWhen our makerspace network moved sign-ups off paper forms and onto our own community site, I realised how much personal data a small volunteer group quietly collects: names, emails, emergency contacts, which machines someone is trained on and who holds an access card for the front door. None of it is glamorous, but all of it needs looking after.This is the checklist we now run through every spring. It isn't legal advice, just what works for volunteer-run spaces around Utrecht.Collect lessEvery field on a form is something you have to protect. We dropped date of birth, home address and "how did you hear about us" from our sign-up form. If we need an emergency contact for a laser cutter induction, we ask for it at the induction and keep it only while the person is an active member.Give fewer people the keysOnly three coordinators have admin rights on the site. Workshop leads get moderator rights for their own group and nothing more.Every admin account uses two-factor login.Access cards are logged in one place, and a lost card is switched off the same evening.Clean up on a scheduleOnce a year we remove accounts that haven't been active for 18 months, after sending a friendly heads-up first. Old volunteer rota sheets get deleted, not archived "just in case".Practise the bad dayWe keep backups, and twice a year someone actually restores one onto a spare laptop. The first attempt took four hours and two pots of coffee. Now it takes forty minutes.A printable version of this checklist goes up in Local Makers Collective next week, for anyone running a space of their own.

]]>Fri, 14 Jul 2023 06:10:13 GMTYesterday I wrote about why we didn't build our music community from scratch. Today, the fun part: making it look good! My developer friend and I spent the weekend restyling our event pages with Tailwind CSS, and I came away with a new appreciation for a tool I'd never heard of a month ago.Changing things while you watchTailwind is "utility-first", which in plain English means you style things with lots of small ready-made classes instead of writing custom CSS. In practice, I could say "a bit more space under the band name" and see it change straight away. We tried about six versions of the gig card in one evening.Our colours, defined onceColours, spacing, fonts and screen sizes all live in one configuration file. Our purple and the slightly loud orange we use for "sold out" are defined once and used everywhere, so nobody gets to sneak in a seventh shade of purple. (That was me. I was the one.)The same look on the website and in the appBecause Tailwind is so widely used, there are versions of it for React Native as well. The event card on the website and the event card in the app share the same styling, so members stop asking why it looks different on their phone.Phones firstPrefixes like sm, md, lg and xl change the layout by screen size. Most of our members check gig details on their phone on the way to the venue, so we designed for that first and let bigger screens catch up. There's also a big community making plugins and themes, so my friend rarely had to start from nothing.I still can't write CSS, but at least now my opinions about it are useful 😄

]]>Thu, 29 Jun 2023 03:29:02 GMTThe photo at the top shows a wartime propeller plane flying wing to wing with a modern jet. That is roughly how I feel at the volunteer coding evenings, where I am usually the oldest person in the room by about thirty years. I spent my working life as an engineer, wrote a fair bit of code along the way (including some PHP back when websites had visitor counters), and retired thinking I was done with it. Then the food bank needed a better volunteer rota, and here we are.What surprised me is how approachable both tools are. A few notes for anyone, of any age, thinking of giving it a go.PHP: old, and none the worse for itEasy to start: the syntax is plain and you can see results in a browser the same afternoon. I had a working sign-up form before my tea went cold. Well, nearly.Plenty to read: PHP has been around long enough that almost every question already has a tutorial, a forum thread or a page in the manual.A big community: whenever I got stuck, someone had been stuck in exactly the same place and written down how they got out.React: new to me, and kinder than expectedComponents: building a screen from small reusable pieces suits an engineer's brain. It is modular design with a new name.Shared work: people publish ready-made components, so you rarely start from nothing.It's JavaScript: one of the most widely used languages around, so help is everywhere, including from my grandson.Good documentation: clear enough for a beginner and deep enough for the young ones who already know everything.Put the two together with MySQL for the data, Next.js for the web and React Native for phones, and you have a stack that welcomes beginners without boring the experts. If an old engineer can get a rota working, so can you :)

]]>Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:18:10 GMTPeople sometimes ask why I run this network on open-source software and host it myself instead of renting a ready-made platform. The short answer: I like knowing where our data lives, and I like that the people who use a tool can also improve it. The longer answer is below.What open source gives a small communityOwnership. Members' posts, photos and conversations sit on a server we control. If a vendor changes its pricing or shuts down, we don't lose years of community history overnight.A head start. UNA gives us groups, events, timelines and messaging out of the box, so our time goes into the community instead of rebuilding login forms.Other people's fixes. Bugs I'd never find on my own get reported and patched by people running communities very different from ours.Room to experiment. When we want to try a new onboarding flow or a different feed, we can change it ourselves and roll back if it flops.Transparency. Anyone can read the code. That's a feature, not a risk: more eyes, fewer surprises.No licence fees. The money we'd spend on seats goes into hosting, moderator training and the occasional meetup pizza.What it costs insteadOpen source isn't free in time. Somebody has to apply updates, watch the backups and answer the "why won't my photo upload" questions. Right now that somebody is mostly me, with a lot of help from our moderators.Giving backIf you run a community on UNA, you can help without writing a line of code: report bugs clearly, translate a language pack, answer a question in the UNA forums, or write up what worked for you in UNA Builders. That's how the shoulders we all stand on get a little taller.P.S. A few of you asked about the logo drafts for this network, so both are attached below: the plain white mark for dark backgrounds and the warmer version we're testing as the app icon. Opinions welcome.... Read more

]]>Sat, 22 Jul 2023 10:29:05 GMTFor a long time our open mic crowd lived in about five places at once: a mailing list for gig news, a group chat that never stopped buzzing, a spreadsheet for performer slots and a shared photo album nobody could ever find. Every Monday I spent an hour copying the same information from one to the other. So when I started looking for a proper home for us, the last thing I wanted was to build one from scratch 🎶Here's why UNA ended up as the backend we went with, written by someone who plays bass, not someone who writes code.The basics were already there: profiles, an activity feed, groups, events, messaging and connections between members. That covers pretty much everything a music community needs, and none of it had to be built. I set up our first listening party event in about ten minutes. It can still look and feel like us, too. You can change the branding, switch modules on and off and, if you have a patient developer friend (I do, bless him), build custom ones. We don't need a jobs board, so it's off, and the gig calendar sits front and centre.The part that really sold me: the new web front end built with Next.js and the mobile app built with React Native both talk to the same UNA backend through its API. When I post an open mic night, it shows up on the site and in the app at the same time. Goodbye, Monday copy and paste.There's also an active community and a marketplace for extra modules and themes, and most of my questions had already been asked and answered by someone else. Regular updates and security patches mean I'm not lying awake worrying about our members' data, which leaves more energy for the actual music.If you run a community of any kind and you're drowning in tools, have a look at what you could stop building yourself. Happy to answer questions from a very non-technical point of view! 🎸

]]>Wed, 28 Jun 2023 08:05:55 GMTWhen we opened the Patient Support Network, I assumed most members would join from a laptop at home. I was wrong. Almost four in five visits come from phones, and a surprising number of posts arrive between midnight and 4am, when worry is loudest and the surgery is closed.That changed how I think about what a support community needs to be. Here is what we've learned so far. A reminder first: peer support is not medical advice, and our moderators point people to urgent care whenever a post sounds like an emergency.Readable when you're exhaustedLarge text, short paragraphs, plain words. Our members include people on strong medication, carers running on four hours' sleep and older people whose eyesight isn't what it was. If a page needs zooming, it's a barrier.Quiet by defaultNobody in a hard week wants their phone buzzing every time someone likes a post. New accounts start on a daily digest, and people can switch more on once they're settled.Privacy people can understandA private group for each condition, with approval to join.A plain note on every group page explaining who can see posts.The option to post anonymously in the most sensitive groups.Help one tap awayEvery page links to a "talk to a moderator" form and a short list of crisis lines. When someone writes at three in the morning, the first reply often comes from another member in a different time zone. That's the quiet magic of it: lanterns in the dark, held up by people who have been there.If you build community software, I'd love to hear how you approach these things. And if you're a member who struggles with any of it, please tell us. We'd much rather fix it than lose you.

]]>Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:36:22 GMTUNA CMS gives you several ways to make a community sustainable. You can offer paid membership levels, sell digital goods, or run subscriptions for premium groups and content, all within your own site. Because you host it yourself, you keep control of pricing, payments and the relationship with your members.Start with what members already valueThe communities I've seen do well with paid options didn't lock away the basics. They charged for things members already wanted more of: workshop recordings, templates, a smaller group with direct access to experts. Free members still got a full, friendly community.Customize to fit your audienceUNA's open-source architecture makes customization practical. You can choose from a wide range of modules and templates, adjust the structure of your site, or build your own modules when nothing off the shelf fits. A patient support community and a game studio's forum need very different things, and both can run on the same platform.Be open about moneyWhatever you charge for, explain where the money goes. Members are far more willing to pay when they know it covers hosting, moderation and the people running things.You can find more about UNA, its modules and its templates at https://unacms.com/.

]]>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:09:54 GMTEvery so often someone suggests we invite a well-known person to join and post here. A famous musician for Music Lovers, a sports star for the Baseball space, a big-name founder for UNA Builders. The logic is simple: they'd bring their followers, and the followers would stay.I understand the appeal, and I've watched it tried on other networks. Here's what usually happens. The celebrity posts twice, gets a wave of likes from people who joined for them, and moves on. Most of those new members never post themselves, because they didn't come for each other. A month later the activity graph is a single spike with a long, flat tail.What actually grows a communityA handful of members who reply to newcomers within a day.Hosts who show up every week, even when only five people come to the event.Small rituals people look forward to: the Friday photo thread, the monthly open mic, the welcome post.None of that needs a famous name. It needs people who are reliably, unglamorously there.So, hello there. If you've been reading quietly for a while, this is your nudge. Say hi in the Welcome Lounge, tell us what you're working on, and reply to someone who just joined. That does more for this network than any celebrity could.

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