As part of the move to the more awesome, and more expensive bunker location it was decided that we needed to increase membership somewhat to support the new space. Around this time I had the idea of building out a cutting table. My reasoning is that a large cutting table is awesome for sewers/crafters, but hard to have in a Vancouver living space. My hope was this would a) Make the existing sewers/crafters at VHS happy. b) Attract more sewers/crafters VHS - something of an untapped membership market I believe. c) Give me a good space to do large scale sewing projects!
I'd mentioned this plan informally to several people and got some positive feedback, and later had a design meeting with interested people.
Getting feedback from other members was great, and generated some great ideas for features such as the overall table dimensions and the drafting style hinged surface. Another great benefit of this was giving other members the opportunity to contribute, for instance Paul awesomely donating the cutting surface itself.
In all of this, one thing that I did *not* do was submit a proposal (in particular a funding proposal) to the list. My thought was to build out the table and cover the material cost as a donation if the membership didn't approve funding. This let me skip a detailed budget for the project - tricky to do exactly since I hoped to use as much scrap material as possible (heh, also laziness :). In practice, this put the membership in the awkward position of being asked to approve funding for a popular thing as already in place.