Hello fellow tinkerers!
It was mentioned to me the other day that since the Tinker Different board was formed on the 7th November, we have been a little quiet. I guess we're still getting into the groove with our new roles, and trying to figure out scheduling around our busy lives and multiple timezones.
We had our first official board meeting on the 13th of November (or 14th, depending on your timezone) and the agenda was so long we didn't get to everything, but we still managed to cover a lot. Most of it was related to figuring out how everything is going to work, and dealing with user feedback. We have published the minutes from that meeting and we plan to publish the minutes for all future meetings.
The first thing I need to say is how incredibly impressed I am with the Tinker Different board. We have assembled an amazing group of incredibly friendly and intelligent people, and they have taken on their new roles with gusto. A huge thanks to you all for volunteering your precious time to make sure that Tinker Different stays awesome.
I must also say a huge thank you to everyone who has provided feedback. We have looked at all of these suggestions and are trying to address every request we can.
I spend time on the forum most days, checking out some of the excellent projects on here, and trying to offer help wherever I can. I think the thing I enjoy the most about Tinker Different is the generosity of the users, giving their time to share knowledge with others.
We currently have around 400 members, which I think is pretty impressive given how young the forum is. And those users are very active too.
We have some plans on the horizon for Tinker Different merchandise, and it won't just be t-shirts and caps. We're hoping to produce some pretty interesting Tinker Different-branded products, so stay tuned for those.
We now have our forum conduct guidelines published. We may make some minor revisions in the future, but we're pretty confident this document covers all the important stuff. Most of it is just common sense, and is there to protect users. If you ever have any questions on these matters, please feel free to ask; we're a pretty reasonable bunch of people.
In response to some feedback we received, we have decided that we will be making high res images available for guest users. It will begin as a trial, while we measure any negative impacts on the site's bandwidth. Assuming all goes well, it will be a permanent change.
We have also decided to rename the "Approved Vendors" section to "Friends of Tinker Different". We quickly realised that if we were going to refer to these vendors as "approved", we would need to devise an approval process. And who was going to approve them? Would we need to provide some sort of warranty around that approval? It just made more sense to list vendors in this section without any official approval process, and allow the members to give their own feedback on their experiences with these vendors.
Tinker Different is currently being funded by its founders, but for those members who are desperate to show their financial support, we will have a PayPal donation link available very soon.
Before I sign off, I must say a huge thank you to all the Tinker Different members for their questions, their answers, their comments and contributions. Keep it up!
Kind regards,
Bruce Rayne
