Best products from r/hackerspaces
We found 3 comments on r/hackerspaces discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 2 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.
> As a general thing, I'd avoid useless tokens as rewards. Something like a special edition logo t-shirt or free time on a tool that normally costs money to operate (we charge for laser cutter time) would make MUCH more sense than a star or ribbon. A yearly appreciation dinner / party with voted awards and accolades might work as well.
Just the opposite -- I've observed (and this is really well explained in Predictably Irrational and presumably other pop-psych lit) that when you offer money or money-equivalent for some things people previously did for free, nobody does anything for free anymore. Once you take things out of the social space and into the market, you can't go back.
So I think it's most important for the rewards to be purely for fun, so people continue doing them for the same reason people volunteer their time for everything else around the space -- because it makes them feel good. Give 'em a funny giraffe on their userpage that says "Glorious" or something, because you can't trade that for money.
Off the top of my head:
This book could be an invaluable resource. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449355676
For the one I ran at my university we had those plastic 4-tiered shelves you find at Lowes for garages and it was a free for all on recycled electronics. Purchased components went into well organized bins that I was always sorting.