This was a great post by @funvill in days long past that is no longer searchable
I was looking for it recently, because it’s very positive and addresses some common questions about workshops. Just a Good Post.
Hello
tl;dr: You should run a workshop or night at VHS on a subject that you are enthusiastic about! We want to know more about what you love to do!
Have you considered running a workshop/night/class at VHS? Its easy! Just choose any topic, Make a small post about the night and send it to the mailing list. Then pick a date in the event calendar that is free, and run it! If you have an idea for a night but don’t know if people would be interested, send it to the mailing list! Ask people!
Just imagine if >You< and all of our other 200 members run one workshop a year! Out calendar would be full to the brim of super interesting workshops on a huge variety of topics. That sounds amazing!
I personally run one workshop every month, I been running a workshop every month for two years strait now. I find it a very rewarding experience to give back to the VHS community.
You don’t need to be an expert on a subject to run a night, you just need to be enthusiastic about a subject. When I ran the Geocaching and Geo Coin night I had only found a total of 10 Geo Caches. But I was excited about the subject so I ran a night on it. Stevemopolis showed up for the night (one of his first times to the space), he had found +2k of Geo Caches over the last 10 years, and had much more experience then I did but we where able to learn from each other and the night was a great success.
The first time I ran a workshop I was worried that I would disappoint people, mess it up, that I wasn’t expert in the subject. I was super nervous. So me and a few other people joined together and ran the workshop. It was a lot less stressful and after that first workshop I felt a lot more comfortable running other workshops.
You don’t have to run the workshop for free. You can charge a course fee and pocket the money for yourself. We would prefer if you donated some of it back to the space and we like free events but you can charge what ever you like. There are no rules on the amount or if you need to donate back to the space.
The only requirement for running a Workshop/Night/Class is that you find a key member to bottom line the event. (open the door, clean up, introduce people to the space, get people to sign wavers). If you are not a key member but would like to run an event, ask on the mailing list for someone to help you bottom line the event.
Some of the past workshops/Nights/Classes
- Intro to Making Puppets workshop
- 3D Printer Night
- Introduction to Home automation with the Raspberry PI
- Artemis SBS Day
- Practical intro to computer security
- Button Making Craft Night
- Stop-Motion Animation Night
- Chainmaille Workshop
- Toymageddon Toy Hacking Night
- Bitcoin Night
- LEGO Mindstorms & Robots
- NODE.JS WORKSHOP
- Open Data and Lasers at VHS!
Big list of past events Events Archives - Vancouver Hack Space
Some event ideas
learn to solder
Intro to ubuntu and other linux OSs
robots
screen printing VHS shirts and hoodies
crypto party
board & card games
minecraft / lan party?
paper folding
knots
Paper lanterns
Stickers
Stencils with the laser cutter.
How to make the perfect mixed drink, Whisky tasting night, Craft beer night,
Wordpress, MySQL, PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl, Bash, c/c++, Go, Node, Rails,
Server administration
Different code licences