OK, so i went and took the Coordinator positions and tasks from the working words document and populated this. This is the loose structure of how we currently function, so i wanted to get this list together as a starting point.

Any additions to this list, i'd appreciate it if you italicized it to make my job a bit easier in the future.

Also, this isn't the "set in stone" position distribution, just a general way to organize thoughts at this point.

Please don't change any of the categories at this point.

 

Shop Coordinator

*Organize and maintain bike repair station and toolboxes.

*Keep track and inventory of tools and supplies

*Order parts, tools, and necessary supplies and maintain communication with Treasurer

*Maintain a “special order” system

 

 

Program Coordinator

*Organize the programs of Free Ride

• What does this mean?

*Make sure all necessary copies and forms are made and accessible

*Maintain records of programs, recycled bikes, volunteers, and volunteer hours

*Obtain necessary volunteers to aid in the projects.

 

Outreach Coordinator

*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

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

 

 

Inreach Coordinator-this is being brainstormed

 

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

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

*Between meeting logistical decision

*Coordinating meetings and work days

*Nag

*Making an agenda for meetings

*Volunteer concept development

*Coordinators keeping track of hours/ volunteer binders

*Interpersonal mediation

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

*Reminder of policy change

 

Email, Phone, and Media Coordinator

*Record and deliver messages to Coordinators

*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.

*Work in concert with the Outreach/Inreach Coordinator to ensure accuracy of outgoing information, i.e. review press releases, flyers, pamphlets, etc.

 

 

Scribe

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

*Organize meeting time, location, and agenda

*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.

 

 

Finance/Treasurer

*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.

 

Volunteer Coordinator

 

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

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

*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

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

*Maintain communication and understanding of organizational techniques with other Coordinators

 

 

 

General Coordinator

(is this a multiple person gig? How to state that?)

*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

 

 

Other Tasks that don't fit in neatly

 

*CJ Liaisonry

*Copy forms

 

Things that aren't getting done, but should

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

 

General Suggestions on the creation of this list

 

Jobs that aren't strongly coupled to others

• Special order system
• Picking up supplies from home depot
• Placing orders with QBP
• Make sure we have enough forms on hand
• Correspondence with specific organizations?
  • i.e. should we have a JCC liaison and a girl scouts liaison, etc, etc?
• Maintaining the staffing calendar
• Organizing work days
• All general coordinator jobs

 

Meta-Discussion of Coordinator Roles

 

(..okay, rather than add another huge block of text with my own opinions, I have attempted to reformat Stuart's commentary into problems & suggested solutions that all can comment on.  -Jessica)

 

Q: Why do we have coordinator roles?

 

(Stuart's Answer) - Coordinator roles allow for efficiency gains and accountability in essential shop functions.  Having one person keep track of several functions at once eliminates the need for several people with individual responsibilities to share information and coordinate with each other about how to get things done.  For example, having a media coordinator lets us just have one person who check the voicemail, and serve as a contact for other organizations.  We all know that Andalusia is responsible for doing this, so we know who to ask if there are questions, other organizations don't get confused talking to 3 different people who don't know what the others have already said, and Andalusia can keep track of who we've promised what to without having to check with other volunteers before making commitments.  (ex - the bike blender, if we had a bike blender coordinator we could eliminate the bike blender calendar and all the runaround phonecalls that go on when someone tries to reserve a date for it).  Coordinators save Free Ride's volunteers a lot of extra work, without them Free Ride might not even be able to operate on an exclusively volunteer basis.

 

Q: What concerns does the collective have about the coordinator roles?

 

Roles & Responsibilities Unclear

• This made it hard for us to transfer roles between volunteers - like when Elijah and Stuart tried to take over the volunteer coordinator role from Scott and kept learning about other stuff Scott had been doing that was part of the role, like clearing outdated forms from the EAB binder, that wasn't documented anywhere.
• things don't get done

Potential Solutions

•     Documentation!  Many other shops with similar structures have a manual that describes what each committee or coordinator is responsible for and provides instructions on how it is done. 

 

Lack of transparency or reporting from coordinators -

• (stuart) I'd like to know more about how people are doing their jobs, the problems they're dealing with, and the solutions they are implementing.  We do have a monthly reportback from coordinators, but it's usually something we try to blow through quickly at the meetings so we can get to more important things. 
• (jessica) I think a related aspect of this problem is that the collective does not have a clear way to provide input for coordinators.  For example, I'd like to see broad outreach goals set by the collective, and then the outreach coordinator executes them.

Potential Solutions

• (stuart) I think Shaun's financial corner has been a good idea, in that it gives us updates at length outside of meetings, and I'd like to see other coordinators adopt something similar.  I also think we need better documentation of procedures used by coordinators to improve transitions, continuity, and transparency.  For example, I'd like there to be a page on the wiki explaining how we decide when to make a deposit, where the deposit gets made, how we figure out if the register recipts match the deposit and what we do when they don't, etc, etc, etc.

• (jessica) Provide a focused time where coordinators are given direction from collective, say once per quarter.  I think this is also an excuse to alter our broken and frequently taxing meeting structure.  Instead of having one long meeting about everything once a month, I think we should:

  Break up meetings into strategic & operational.

  • Operations meetings – twice a month. 
    • Urgent decisions – CJ stuff, responses to developing situations.
    • Daily operations questions- how many staff should be on shift, moving stuff around, tweaking operational policies (new item to add to closing checklist; library bikes will now be...etc).
  • Strategic meetings – once a quarter
    • Set priorities for committees: committee members share their ideas with full group, collective can provide input & direction for committee work. 
    • Also a time when people (esp. new) can shift into committees as interested.
    • tweak committees' list of responsibilities as necessary

 

Tension: do stuff yourself vs. engage collective to do the stuff

 

(stuart) We've also talked about the difference between delegating work and doing it yourself as it related to transparency and centralization of decision making powers.  I'm not sure the delegation -> DIY axis is the right one to discuss this point though.  I don't really think delegation per-se is a way to increase tranparency or decentralize decisionmaking.  Rather, I'd like to contrast the idea of a coordinator as the person who is responsible for getting things done,  gets them done if no one else will, makes sure that everyone else knows what's happening, and has some sort of process in place to make sure they don't overstep the commission given them by the collective, with the alternate idea of the coordinator as the person whose primary responsibility is to get as many people as possible (hopefully everyone in the collective) involved in the entire process of making decisions about and doing whatever it is they're responsible for coordinating.  In this second version of the coordinator role, the goal, in the end, is not just to see to it that the work gets done well and on time, but to create the organization and culture we'd need to make the coordinator superfluous.  I don't think these two versions are mutually exclusive, and our current coordinators, for the most part, already seem to be trying to do their jobs in a way that mixes both, but I'd like to know if other folks agree with me that the second version is a desireable and clear goal?

 

Lack of accessibility/lack of success recruiting new coordinators

 

• The final concern I have is that coordinator roles can only be filled by folks who have a lot of free time to dedicate to Free Ride.  Because we don't pay people for their time, this precludes anyone who doesn't have the luxury of that time from becoming a coordinator.  When we assign most of the essential functions of the shop to the coordinators we make it more difficult for some folks to become involved with Free Ride on an equal footing with the rest of us.  I think that this is a serious impediment to the diversity of our collective that needs to be addressed in the long term..

Potential Solutions:

• Paying staff and coordinators
  • (jessica) Santa Cruz Bike Church pays $15 per hour for all "clerkships" (similar to coordinators except you can have multiple people doing one), up to 5 hrs per week.  People who staff shifts more than once a week can also be paid. 
  • (jessica) this would cost $2500 per year per person if they worked 5 hrs/week, 50wks/year.  (and at $10 per hour).  6 coordinators = $15,000 per year.
  • (jessica) would cost $600 per year per person if we did 5 hrs per month limit at $10 per hour.  6 coordinators = $3600 per year
• Break the coordinator roles up into smaller chunks so that more people are able to do them.
  • (jessica) I think this would help with accessibility.  A person could agree to do x,y,z for 6 months, instead of being the bottom-liner of a whole category of the shop.
  • (jessica) This could co-exist with current system - certain fairly isolated tasks could be doled out on their own instead of packaged into a coordinator role
  • (jessica) Another way to achieve this would be to turn certain coordinatorships into committees - responsibilities are broken down between several people.
• Pay 1-2 people to play a major caretaker role = the centralized "paid staff" solution
  • (jessica) this would require a really strong system for communication & accountability between collective & "staff"
  • (jessica) we'd have to pay several thousand a year to make it worth it.

 

 

Scope of coordinators' decision-making power unclear

• (jessica) It seems unclear when coordinators need to consult collective.  I think this results in wasted time at general meetings discussing small things, as well as big things sometimes happening without consultation.

Potential solutions

• (jessica) Set some guidelines for when decisions need to be brought back to the collective

• for actions that will useFR resources (money, stuff, etc) not already allocated for that purpose
• If decision will involve the time, energy, or resources of other people
• substantial undertakings that differ from the agreed-upon goals
• decisions to abandon agreed-upon goals
• decisions that affect the public image or reputation of the shop
• decisions that affect the general culture/experience at the shop

 

Q: What should the collective do about coordinatorships?

 

(Stuart's Answer) - We know that Free Ride can operate with the coordinator roles designed as they are now, and for the time being I think it should.  We need well documented roles that allow transition and transparency so that we can choose new coordinators and respect term limits on positions.  Because meeting time is one of Free Ride's scarcist and most valuable resources, I don't think we should dive into the long term restructuring of how we allocate responsibility before we've wrapped up more pressing issues like the CJ lease, BP fiscal agreement, FR Words, etc, etc.  The long term changes I'm thinking about are really huge ones, and it would be a big mistake to try and make them in one fell swoop.  I'd rather that we try to evolve a better system over time by making small changes to individual roles as potential improvements come up.

 

(jessica)

The way I'm thinking about it, we are transitioning from a very small group, we are now mid-sized, and may even (hopefully) grow further.  Growing larger requires more effort with communication, documentation, & interpersonal organization to maintain the values we care about - collectivity, openess, accessibility.  There's a number of possible solutions outlined to the problems above.  Here are ones I'm leaning towards, in part because they will set us up well for future growth. 

• divide meetings into "strategic" & "operational" (see above).  This is building in a process for input into coordinatorships, and for adjustment of whatever new system we agree upon as necessary.  Also should add yearly retreat-ish day to make major decisions about our goals (new kids programming?  expand classes? expand/eliminate adult earn-a-bike)
• allow multiple people to take on coordinatorships together, and/or explicitly structure some coordinatorships as committees.  This helps to engage people who might be timid about taking on a whole job themselves, and helps with accessibility; For example, if Johnny and I both have an interest in volunteers, we can both work on that.  We could set up a standard organizational structure for committees or have them self-organize.
• Focus on documentation- with the ultimate goal of creating a manual for all positions; so a stranger could walk in, pick up the manuel, and with some ingenuity do a pretty good job with what our "coordinators for life" currently do. 
• decide on coordinatorship terms & stick to them
• set up guidelines for when decisions need to come to the collective

 

(Matt)

    Ok 11th hour dark horse discussion adds here but, I feel that the transition from the shop being very small to quite large is the a cause of much of this tension.  I think this is the case because the shop is serving more and more people but the day to day workings of the shop continue to be carried out by the same core people.  Our current set up works, but it is more and more like a buisness ( in my opinion).  Especially since the stakes seem higher now that Free Ride is a force to be reconned with.  Nobody wants to have anything screw up, and so the people who we know we can count are static in their positions by necessity.  Also the in-ability of people to take on these serious tasks with full time jobs keeps our pool of applicants low. 

 

    Words like transparency, accountability, and the meeting structure scare me out of wanting to take on more responsability especially when I

know that even though I have a coordinator role I am only doing one of the five bullet points listed under my role.  I'll go ahead and use the word "half-assing" when refering to my productivity as a scribe, but thats ALL I feel like I can give on a month to month basis and still have enough love in my heart for this rag-tag powerhouse of an organization to keep comming to meetings. 

    My thought is that bicycling is getting bigger every year and our coordinator system is for a small sized organization which free ride is not anymore.  I think that we'll have to adopt a different model of organization sooner or later, and that some of the structures of larger collectives should be looked at more carefully.  I personally liked chicago's system of two different organizations; one dedicated to teaching people how to fix bikes, and one dedicated to recycling bikes and getting more people on them. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

 

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