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Goals

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 1 month ago

Retreat Goals

Back to the Retreat Planning page

 

The big one. What do you hope to get out of a weekend-long meeting? Let's start concise - bullet-pointed even; let's not have the discussion here. The point of this page is to develop the weekend's agenda.

 

  • Stuart

 

I've got a lot of things floating around that all might fit together into a coherent plan for Free Ride. Some of them show up below. To try and sketch the big issues/possibilities that I see:

 

  • Many volunteers are working at or beyond their willingness to contribute time and energy
  • Our user base continues to grow, and we expect this summer to be even busier
  • Despite having more people coming through the shop, our collective council is not growing
  • We need to maintain financial viability, which is currently dependent on selling bikes during open shop

 

  • Some volunteers are excited about the possibility of being paid to work at Free Ride
    • These possibilities include payment for teaching classes, payment for clerical work, and the commission or consignment system.
  • Some volunteers are concerned about how having paid staff would affect our collective
  • Some volunteers are tired of staffing open shop and would prefer to be teaching classes or doing other more structured or personally rewarding things at Free Ride

 

Here are some scattered, but more specific, things I'd like to bring up at the retreat.

 

    • Have an accounting of how many hours we are willing to put into the shop per week and what our current programs require. (this could be part of a pre-retreat worksheet everyone completes)
      • This is potentially conditional on the type of work being done (i.e. 1 hour of meetings, 3 houurs unpaid staffing, 8 hours paid staffing, 1 hour paid clerical, etc)
    • Discuss restructuring our pricing/labor valuation
      • If we're going to increase prices, do we want to seriously discuss a sliding scale system?
    • Have a discussion of where to focus our programs in the future
      • I think we should be doing less open shop and more classes/community work
      • This lets our time commitments be flexible as the number of available volunteer hours changes (with a lead time of a few months), and I believe many of us are more interested in staffing in a more structured environment than open shop.
      • This also involves financial issues to a very significant degree, since Open Shop and selling bikes through Open Shop remain our primary source of sustaining income.
    • Establish the consignment (aka commission) system
      • I have a few specific proposals here that I think will make the program work better
        • Pay builders more to fix bikes with lower base prices, but subtract the additional pay from FR's profit rather than adding it to the price the consumer pays. Pay rates would be established using a tiered system base price $0-$30 = $11/hr compensation, 30-45 = 10/hr, 45-55 = 9/hr 55+ = 8/hr. Because FR has a glut of these low end bikes and doesn't really have a problem getting rid of nicer bikes, we should encourage people to build them by paying them more.
        • If a bike does not sell, reduce its price by $10/month for every month it sits around after the second month. This price reduction comes out of FR's share, not the builders. Once FR's share reaches zero the builder may choose to allow the price to continue to fall at $10/month at their discretion. Although we should choose base prices so that a bikes eventual sale price is fair, we may make a mistake and end up with an overpriced bike. This allows us to correct for this mistake while minimizing the introduction of competition between builders (which could happen if we let builders set their own hourly rates, or discount their own bikes, for eg).
    • Check for interest in a BUGS model expansion into other neighborhoods as a replacement/supplement to open shop. (BUGS = Bicycle User GroupS - very small neighborhood scale resources that provide tools and space for fixing your bike - something like a stand and a toolbox in a locked closet at the community center). Certification, training, and startup costs could happen through Free Ride, but administration and membership management would happen through the individual BUGS.
      • I imagine a model were a group approaches FR with interest in starting up a local resource, we provide materials and training in exchange for an agreement that all users of their shop will get certified by taking a class at Free Ride (that we get paid for), and that we will provide supplies for them (i.e. they get to add things to QBP orders) at a slight markup. The local group can eventually pay us back for the materials and then have complete autonomy in deciding who uses their shop.

 

      • For e.g. if we don't want to get swamped with students, why not help set up shops on or near their campuses? Then we could focus on selling them bikes and teaching classes to certify them to repair those bikes at their local shop.

 

 

  • Morgan's Goals:
    • Have a Crabgrass workshop;hopefully start using that cool little bit of software.
    • Have a frank and painful discussion of our structure, governance, and centralization.
    • Talk about our capacity and the demand for our project, and what to do when the latter is greater then the former.
    • Revisit our vision, and talk about whether we're meeting it.
    • Have some discussion around co-op structure and other tools to better engage volunteers & supporters.

 

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Will's Goals:

 

Hmm... I could say many things here, but believe it or not, I'm feeling the urge to be brief.

 

1) Generally speaking, a lot of what Stuart had to say above sounds pretty good to me.

 

2) I like open shop. It gets lots of people on bikes, and it can be a really fun and positive place to hang out (as long as things aren't too crowded). There is obviously a huge demand for open shop, and it would be nice if Free Ride could find a sustainable way to staff many more shifts during the peak season in order to make things less crowded.

 

3) I find myself doing some soul searching about my involvement with Free Ride. I care a lot about getting people on bikes; Free Ride does that which is great, and being involved is very rewarding to me. However, it is also rewarding to pay my rent, have heat, eat healthy food, etc. Considering my current status of "more or less broke", I cannot continue to contribute so much uncompensated volunteer time. I believe others in the collective are in similar positions. I think we should seriously look at ways for people to get more back for the time they put in.

 

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Jessica's goals:

 

note: Morgan, perhaps you could say more about what your concerns are regarding "structure, governance, and centralization"?

 

  • Create guidelines for committee autonomy - when does a decision need to come back to the collective?
  • Address the imbalance between demand for FR services and the lack of growth in the number of people willing to do the serving. 
    •     I think we should strongly consider a membership-based cooperative structure.  Like early food co-ops.  Right now we don't create any expectation that people give back, so they don't.  Something along the lines of...first visit to the shop is free, after that you have to join.  To join you have to either staff a shift every 3 months, or you have to pay an amount that would compensate someone else to staff that number of shifts.  Or perhaps, two shifts a week are for members only, one shift is open to anyone (that would encourange anyone who actually wanted to finish anything to become a member).  Just brainstorming here, there could be lots of possibilities.
    •    I think more can also be done in the way of improving volunteer recruitment and training. 
    •    I'm interested in the idea of shifting more effort to classes.
    •    I think we need to think hard about who our current demographic served is, who we want it to be, and how any of these changes will increase/diminish accessibility to various sectors of the population.
    •    I am interested in discussing paying people.  The best model I've found for this is the Santa Cruz Bike Church.  They pay people who do work for committees or who staff more than once a week.  I have their bylaws if anyone wants to check the system out.
  • Discuss changing our pricing structure - something along the lines of, double the volunteer wage + double the price of bikes. 
  • What are we going to do about responding to Mikes latest communication, and to the lease draft?  I'd hate to have this occupy a substantial amount of our precious retreat time - the reason we never talk about big-picture issues is because operational stuff crowds those discussions out.  But we do need a solid plan to make sure this gets done somehow.  There is currently no monthly meeting scheduled for March. Options -
    • wait until april (seems ridiculous)
    • set up a special "rent discussion" meeting
    • talk about it during the retreat.
  • Something I'd love to do, but would sacrifice if the time is overfull...have a discussion about a code of conduct for FR participants + procedure for what to do when it is violated.

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