1/18/08 Community Bike Project Minutes

Community Bike Project Minutes – 1/31/08
In attendance: Geoff Beyer, Stan Brinkerhoff, Madeline Sharrow, Colin Gunn, Alec Hill, Scott

Q&A with Geoff about the last program in Montpelier:
-    They aimed to keep 12 out, and generally had 8 out at a time. 12 or more is important to maintain a “critical mass” where bikes are visible and available.
-    They had a relationship with the High School that supported teen ownership of the project.
-    The signs were made in a prison-based factory.
-    Workers could get hooked into the project through Diversion or the Dept. of Labor.

Funding for a potential part-time staff:
-    Mostly for coordinating youth involvement.
-    We’ll make up an application for a Mazur grant.
o    Geoff and Scott will write up a draft
o    Geoff will talk to Community Connections folk
o    Colin will talk to ETM Bike Group about possible cooperation
-    Vermont Community Fund was mentioned as a future possible funding source

Physical aspects of the project:
-    Freeride folks will look into thorn-resistant tires and tubes
-    The idea of a trailer on one of the community bikes, or rental/borrow trailer was brought up
-    Drop point rack location brainstorm: bus stop, library, city hall, food coop, state house.

Vision:
-    Stan will start a draft, to be revised over email

No next meeting time was set. Plans were made to research weather for a warm, bright day when skylights won’t be covered in snow to dig through our stockpile to find bikes and parts for the project.

12/20/7 Community Bike Project Minutes

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.