12/20/07 Meeting Minutes for the Community Bike Project
In attendance: Colin Gunn, Matt Brittenham, Stan Brinkerhoff, was Alec there? maybe Alec Hill
We first outlined the following categories of concerns (project needs), all of which are tied into one another, but will be good to take on separately at times:
- Bike recovery/accounting/tracking
- Where the bikes “live” and how they come and go
- Maintenance
- How the bikes are built
- PR
- Organizational process
- Timeline – first year and beyond
- Funding
- Preventing total disappearance
Then we had a long discussion about these topics. The following ideas were floated:
- Where they live/recovery/maintenance: We could have 3 or 4 racks in town designated as community bike racks. Volunteers would check the racks weekly and enter findings into a centralized (web-based) database which would tell us when a bike is missing for a long period, or what bikes need work.
- How the bikes are built: We discussed how to paint them if at all (the minimum it would take to designate them as community bikes). The triangle signs would explain the project, intended use, contact info for maintenance, and bike number. They can all have baskets for shopping use. We started finding cheap mountain bike frames with horizontal dropouts (so they can be single-speed) everywhere, and all thought this should be the way to go.
- PR: We didn’t talk much about this, but thought that the name should encourage valued community ownership (more than Freeride).
Then we talked about the next steps. We kicked around all of the great things that this project could entail if there was a lot of organizational energy behind it, and discussed whether we should look into funding a position for someone to oversee the program, but decided that we could easily meet and exceed the agreements of our initial New England Grassroots Environmental Fund grant relying on volunteer energy alone.
We decided to look for more bike frames that meet our ideals, do some research, and reconvene at some point in January, extending the invitation to everyone else who had expressed interest. Research included: Giant bike trailers, other community bike projects (and Montpelier’s last one), school/community connections employees who may be able to facilitate getting middle and high school students involved, web-based databases.
