[Noisebridge-discuss] Another DIYbio thread!

[Seth David Schoen]

William Heath writes:

> We have followed the proper protocols to collaborate and are being excellent
> to you all.  We had approval from the safety committee etc... 

I think we may have had a misunderstanding about this, because although
the safety committee did discuss your activities at our recent meeting,
our conclusion was that we would like to know more about your plans and
try to get someone uninvolved to have a look at them, rather than that
we had seen your plans and that we were happy with them.

However, a possibly more important point from the safety meeting, which
I mentioned at last week's general meeting, was that we didn't know
whether there was a consensus from the general meeting about whether the
safety committee -- or anybody else -- could or should review or approve
projects when they appeared to involve unusually dangerous materials or
activities.  The safety committee is comfortable with doing
uncontroversial things that make the space safer in general (like
installing fire extinguishers and first aid kits), but we don't know
what Noisebridge's consensus will be on how to handle project-based
safety issues, which may involve substantive disagreements among members
about how to evaluate and mitigate risks.

It seems like we have already run into an example of this issue, so I
hope that people will be willing on Tuesday to try to approach a
consensus about the "how to handle project-oriented safety concerns in
general" problem, not just about DIYBio.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Wol dir, werlt, daz du bist
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   | also freudenriche!
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |           -- Carmina Burana