What is your name?

I like building wall modules in the workshop, and watching videos with commentary and q&a from Marcin about the foundation builds. I'm especially proud of our progress and the final Seed Home product, which I brag on to my family and friends and post on social media.

I find the Hero-X innovation challenge work on Saturdays and Extreme Enterprise work on Tuesdays / Thursdays hard-to-define and not well-suited to a group discussion format. I'm happy to participate in brief (< 1 hour), infrequent sessions (once every few weeks) to brainstorm or gather feedback on specific proposals, but developing those feedback into specific assets is not my strength and feels more appropriate as work for long-term paid staff members with an official stake in OSE.

More free time in the evenings and weekends, and room for us to cultivate our own projects around the land. e.g. Wes's game, or fixing up the greenhouse, or making the hablab more comfortable for future participants.

Better use of our time together during morning meetings. I would suggest a pair programming / mob programming approach, which I'm happy to facilitate if desired, where we each take turns driving the same computer during a e.g. session to teach a specific CAD task.

Joshua Thomas

Having clear defined goals and management of the short-term projects.

Giving honest feedback during meetings and trying to work through any issues a particular individual may have.

Team-work and collaboration when in the workshop building the modules for the home.

The overall mission and high level goals are 100% worth supporting and dedicating effort to.

No personal issues with anyone in the program! I think we are a great group of people with a lot of talent.

Long-term management of projects and low level work associated is not laid out well.

There are many projects and people are spread thin. This doesn't appear to be the case when we are focusing on one thing, but there are inter-dependencies woven in to the long term goals (Scaling collaboration but requiring server infrastructure or the developing a highly targeted marketing plan to be built along with the everyday work of building the eco-home for example) which have to be accounted for as well.

There is a lack of purpose-driven software tools that can lessen the administrative overhead of managing multiple documents, slides or wiki pages.

Coming up with a viable business model seems to be a problem point.

Where OSE has a specific use case; Use specific open-source projects that can fill the need without bloating too much.
Individuals will naturally gravitate toward where their strengths are. Laying out things that need to be done clearly will help get individuals to show up to do the work.
Research and build the infrastructure needed to scale the operations and support the contributors.(Discourse, OpenProject, Etc)

I've enjoyed physically building house modules and working towards improvements at Factor E Farm. I like being in nature: the frogs, fireflies, and mint around HabLab improve my well being. I like reading about permaculture and open source while becoming more literate regarding the OSE wiki CAD assets. I have a better intuition of the challenges involved in distributing open source hardware from digital models now and I'm excited to make progress there. Hanging out with the other apprentices after hours has been the highlight for me so far: for example we've watched movies (like Jodorowsky's Dune), made tea and grown plants. :)

I imagined having more autonomy, creativity, entreprenuership practice, and self-learning/socratic dialogue when I joined this program than what is currently the defacto status (ie it feels like school or a regular job, not saving the world by becoming a movement entreprenuer). I feel that our curriculum is too slow for effective learning and I am being held back from passionate contribution: my programming skillset is unutilized. I would rather spend my time learning how to script freecad and create tools to automate the generation of cad layouts and help others vs manually placing the modules for single house configuration one by one.

I think the morning sessions are haphazard and could be compressed into 15 minutes or less (unless they are modified to contain more freeform explorations or discussion on engineering/history), and I feel frustrated when we start 20 minutes after schedule every single day because of simple technical problems like the inevitable infinite echo. I want to learn more and how much energy I have is a function of the quality of my learning. Let's talk about physics from first principles and apply what we learn! I want to learn KiCAD, I want to learn electrical and structural engineering. I do not want to learn how to copy and paste a house module into a duplicate file and rename it :/ I want to learn how to design new machines from scratch and go through that process. Collaborative literacy is an unsolved problem and I want to discuss and solve bottlenecks to these processes. I want to engage with the remote world, but not by unmuting my mic every time I speak and staring into a computer screen 24/7 for every task. I think the schedule structure is too rigid and our planning should be based more around what we (the apprentices) want to prioritize learning. I feel that placing too many constraints or expectations on our time and behavior is adverse to the philosophy of open source. I am so hopeful we can create a community around empowering everyone in the world with open source hardware.

I like the open dialogue and I can't complain about the living arrangements.

Not making things convenient for remote participants and potential newcomers: audio problems, FreeCAD 16 is inconvenient to download

get an audio mixer to have one audio input to the internet in the hablab allowing remote attendees and viewers to always hear everyone at the table, use latest version of FreeCAD, let it be known to the public what help is needed

The morning sessions on FreeCAD are great. I am slow on learning FreeCAD and need more time. The best part for me is the practical part in the workshop building the wall modules. That's easiest for me, it is heavy physical work, but non-the-less satisfying work.

What I think could work better for me, is we could collaborate on housekeeping and cooking duties. Rather than each person cooking for self, if we collaborated, one person cooking for everyone would be more efficient use our time. Have a roster one cook per day. Need to discuss with my house mates. On the apprenticeship program no complaints.

I liked the idea of partnering with others to work on something, but don't know if that should be done during the design sessions or outside of them. And I'm wondering if it would be better to pair remote people with others who are there in person (perhaps easier to get questions answered and a good way to help people get to know each other). And I liked the Mastering Basics discussion today.

The audio has been an issue, but hopefully that will be addressed soon once the new equipment arrives (has it been ordered?). I think time could be managed better during the morning design sessions as well in a few ways.

Some ways to improve time management during our morning design sessions: (1) What's the target length for these? I thought it was 1 hour, but perhaps it's 2? (2) For live exercises, particularly when done at the end of a design session, perhaps remote participants can go earlier since they're likely the ones who won't be able to stick around past the scheduled time for the session. (3) I think we should start with a plan for what topics to discuss during a design session, how much time we want to allocate to them, and whether some are higher priorities than others. Then someone can be a time keeper who keeps an eye on when we're approaching our allocated times so that we can decide at that point whether to continue with the current task and take time away from another task, or to switch to the other task. I can share a way to do this in Trello and visually explain what I mean if that helps....