Free Ride! Meeting Minutes, Sunday October 7, 2007, 1 pm at 7 Beelen St

{Scribe's comments marked with {these} curly things, "FR"=Free Ride, "CJ"=Construction Junction}

 

{This was a special meeting to continue the discussion on coordinator role stuff from the August 19, 2007 special meeting. Today's general topic was finding a way to move forward with the idea of gradually transitioning from individual coordinatorships to committees}

 

Reportbacks on how the commitee stuff is going

{on Aug 19 we decided to have coordinators, at their discretion, try forming committees to help do their stuff}

 

Volunteer committee (Jessica, Stuart, Johnny):

- Talked about having a meeting...hasn't happened yet though

 

Shop committee (Erok, Stuart):

- Erok is working on an order sheet (it's here on the wiki someplace)

- Might have a committee meeting this week

 

Program committee (Scott, Jessica, Paige, Geoff, Andy):

- Met and coordinated the Housing authority class for kids from Homewood

- Currently working with the Homewood kids, might do something with kids from Garfield later

- Housing authority would like to find a way to do an off site earn-a-bike program for places like Hazelwood and North Side. They've talked about maybe buying a set of tools and providing space

- Currently working on developing an environmental curriculum

 

Erok's Question: what should I do with emails I get about youth programming?

Scott: Send them to me.

 

Geoff will have a proposal at the October 14 meeting about buying a copy of a bike physics book that the high school physics teacher he's working with wants to use.

 

Financial committee of one (Shaun):

- There's an audit going on at the moment that includes FR, he's been answering some questions about documentation for paying rent to CJ and grant expenditures

- Trying to figure out what needs to happen for paying quarterly taxes

- Writing up documentation for the financial stuff will be a little tricky for things invoving Quickbooks since he does a lot of it somewhat by feel

 

 

Discussion of how to use the rest of our meeting time

Erok: let's figure out which committees we need to have

 

Jessica's idea {as Will understands it, Jessica please correct this if it's inaccurate}

- The current meeting structure (hash out everything once a month) is not adequate for dealing with all the things that need attention.

- Monthly meetings tend to involve a long and tedious mixture of short term opperational stuff and long term strategic discussions.

- Lets try to separate things out some:

   + Delegate some responsibility and decision making authority to committees (for example, give directions at quarterly strategic meetings)

   + Let committees handle their day to day detail stuff at their own meetings rather than doing full discussion and consensus at general monthly meetings

   + Talk about general announcements, things that affect the whole collective, coordination between committees, stuff that full needs consensus, etc at the monthly meetings

   + Have quarterly meetings for talking about things like what the committees will do, how they will work, whether we think the whole committee idea isn't working, writing the words, etc.

 

 

Discussion of which committees we should have and what they should do

 

{This was a pretty loose discussion, so I'm shuffling, organizing, paraphrasing, and summarizing things somewhat}

 

Clarifying what we're trying to do with the whole committee thing:

• Major goals:
  • Help new people to get involved by clarifying FR's organizational framework so it can more easily be written down and explained
  • Make meetings less painful
  • Create enough structure and written documentation so that people can move in and out of roles, committee memberships, or whatever we call them, without a great deal of trouble
  • Create an organizational framework that is not totally dependent on a few people dedicating huge hunks of their time to the collective
• Approach:
  • Gradually transition from "coordinators" to "committees" (think work in progress, experiment, etc.)
  • Committees may be just one person, and there may be some special cases that don't fit into the committee thing all that well (like the CJ liason)
  • Some provision needs to be made for term limits in the committee structure. For example, if we have "committee chairs" perhaps the same person should not be allowed to hold the same chair for two terms in a row.
  • There needs to be a good system of communication in place so that the committees are accountable to the collective and that people can find out what the committees are up to.
  • By making "committees" we're not so much trying to materialize a vast horde of new people to do things. Rather, we are trying to re-organize what is already happening and build a framework that will accomodate people coming and going. On the other hand, we do need to think seriously about recruiting new volunteers.

 

 

How to move forward:

Will's idea: For this meeting, lets just try to make an informal framework of how the committees will work and then try it out for a while. Maybe we could schedule a quarterly strategic meeting for the winter, preferably before the holidays and the crazy cold in Jan/Feb, to talk about formalizing things (who will be on which committee, term limits, etc). Assuming things are working out ok with the committees by then, maybe we could then work toward putting the committee stuff into the Words to be approved at a Spring 2008 quarterly meeting.

 

Proposal: For this meeting let's outline which committees we should have and what they will do. After that let's talk about recruiting new volunteers...Approved

 

 

Committees and What They Will Do

 

{We went through a lot of tasks from the coordinator roles page on the wiki and re-shuffled them into a framework of committees using a bunch of stickies on Erok's computer. The results are below (and on the coordinator roles page). Our intention is to present this stuff to everybody at the October meeting next week in the form of a couple proposals.}

 

Stuff from the stickies:

This is the committee structure that we came up with {at the special meeting on October 7, 2007}:

 

PROGRAM

*Organize and coordinate the programs of Free Ride as directed by the collective

*keeping track of shop calendar and usage

*Obtain necessary volunteers to aid in the programs

*Correspond with schools, camps, after school programs etc. who want a Free Ride! person to teach bike mechanics

*advertise programs

 

VOLUNTEER

*Volunteer concept development

*Open shop volunteer

*communicate to people "how to participate"

*Coordinators keeping track of hours/ volunteer binders

*develop system for communicating, recruiting volunteers

*track and manage different levels of volunteers {earn-a-bike, collective council, any others?}

 

FINANCE

*Maintain a system of recording Free Ride funds, including current electronic book-keeping schemes and keeping/logging receipts.

*Disburse funds judicially, which may include analysis of payment terms for contracted services and keeping an ear to all grant-funded situations.

*Report regularly on expenditures and income. Use family friendly language where appropriate.

*Maintain files which are available to the community. (What files and how? What community?)

*Take care of monthly or yearly bills, forms, and rent.

*Stay in communication with the accountant.

*Maintain cooperative and happy-go-lucky relationship with the BikePGH Finance Committee, should one ever be created.

*Maintain and oversee cash register and all related functions.

 

OUTREACH

*Correspond with people who want Free Ride! to table at events- Summer Festivals, School Fairs, Earth Days etc.

*Keep abreast of community events and involve Free Ride! if deemed worthy

*Find volunteers to staff these events

*Correspond with students/artists etc who want to visit Free Ride to photograph, videotape, write a paper or article or get bike parts for a art/robotic/architecture project

*Update voicemail message according to current activities

*Maintain and answer email to the Free Ride general info address

*Compose and disseminate media releases.

*Maintain necessary contacts with media outlets.

*ensure accuracy of outgoing information, i.e. review press releases, flyers, pamphlets, etc.

*Record and deliver messages to Coordinators

*maintain email list

 

OPEN SHOP

*Maintain records of recycled bikes,

*Maintain a system of keeping track of bikes and bicycle inventory

*Keep track of project and Earn-a-Bikes and call people when they have not returned for two weeks.

*Maintain the staffing calendar, both online and in the shop, making sure that all shifts are sufficiently covered

*Diagnose and label incoming repairs for the ease of Workshop Coordinators.

 

    -GENERAL COORDINATOR (PART OF "OPEN SHOP" COMMITTEE)

        *Open and close workshops.

        *Turn on and off the lights and air compressor.

        *Maintain orderly workshops, keep workbenches and tables clear of debris, sweep floor, and encourage volunteers to clean up.

        *Make sure regular trash, and all recycling: steel scrap, bottles, cans, cardboard paper get taken out when full

        *Keep lists of items in short supply for Repair Coordinator.

        *Attend Coordinators meetings/workshops.

        *Sort recent donations.

        *Know and be able to run the shop and answer customer questions.

        *Sell bikes

        *Understand cash register and front-end transaction details

 

INREACH

*Making sure that meetings are emailed a week in advance and they have a time and a place.

*Nag, Follow up on things we say we’re going to do.

*Making an agenda for general meetings

*Interpersonal mediation "vibe patrol"

*Reminder of policy change

*information dissemination to all, collective communication

*Maintain and disseminate a historical record of meetings, etc.

*Take minutes (or delegate responsibility for such) at each meeting.

*Post minutes monthly and as quickly as is reasonably possible.

*Organize a file containing old minutes, election results Words amendments etc. for easy access to volunteers.

 

SHOP

*Organize and maintain layout, bike repair stations and toolboxes.

*Keep track and inventory of tools and supplies

*Order or buy parts, tools, and necessary supplies and maintain communication with Finance Commitee

*Maintain a “special order” system

*Organize procedures for shop security and safety

*Coordinating work days

*Keep bikes in shop organized and neat in a way that all users can understand.

 

DUNNO YET

*Finding resolution to things ex. This meeting wasn’t explicitly decided

*Between meeting logistical decision

*Take responsibility for organizing “Special Work Days and/or Projects”

*Maintain communication and understanding of organizational techniques with other Coordinators

*CJ Liaisonry

*put things on the calendar

 

 

Additional things resulting from the discussion:

 

One of the main goals of delegating stuff to committees is to lighten the load of things to deal with at general meetings. However, moving stuff out of the general meetings will worsen the existing problem of keeping people informed about what's going on. The informal consensus of the people here today was that improving how we communicate what's going on needs to be a high priority, particularly if we start moving decisions out into committee meetings.

 

Ideas on the improving communication thing:

- Sounds like a job for the inreach committee

- Make a bulletin board space in the shop (meeting times & locations, committee contact people, announcements, etc.)

- Keep documenting stuff on the wiki

- Do more social, informal, and otherwise non-stressful stuff so we (collective council) don't just interact with each other during open shop and meetings

 

Volunteers & Recruiting:

- Volunteers are critical to making FR work... the whole volunteer thing could use more attention (hence the volunteer committee)

- It would be nice to have a more unified approach to things like earn-a-bike volunteer jobs, recruiting new folks to staff open shop,  should do up to tracking hours for collective council membership

- The point was raised that using "volunteer" interchangably to mean people who staff open shop, collective council members, and people who are just earning a bike is pretty confusing.  General agreement ensued, but nothing much came of it.