[Noisebridge-discuss] Another DIYbio thread!

[jim]

   my take: the safety committee should take 
responsibility for standards we all can apply 
to using the space. it doesn't approve, the 
group approves; rather, it evaluates and gives 
its assessment of whatever comes up (lots of 
salt, electrical wires dangling, greasy 
surfaces...) on its radar. 

   example: 
[safety committee] "your inflatable flying 
hammock has a hazardous feature of being easy 
to tip over." 
[group meeting] "we don't care, we like it 
and we approve." 
   the example leaves unaddressed any remedy 
or accountability that follows some member 
of the press, given a demonstration, who 
falls from a ceiling height and is taken to 
a hospital. 



On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 11:59 -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> 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.
>