January 17, 2010 Collective Council Meeting¶

Agenda¶

• Committee Report-backs
  • Finance
  • Shop
  • Programming
  • Communications
• Review of the shop re-organization plan
  • Presentation/Summary by the shop committee
  • Comments, suggestions, concerns and questions from the rest of the group
• Classes schedule for next year
• Build-a-thon follow-up
• Start a “burn-out” quenching task force
  • William is interested in gathering a group to identify key areas in Free Ride that are mega-drains on volunteer fun
  • Initial work to involve the task force and then in the second stage will involve as many Free Riders as possible
  • The goal? Make Free Ride so fun we can’t wait for the next chance to pitch in!
• 501( c )(3) Status
• Connections with other Bike Collectives
  • Ben Masters (Meadville, PA), says “Thanks”
  • Mark Walsh, asking questions to start something in New Hampshire
  • Caroline in the Southwest
• Stephen Haynes ( fatherofodin.net ) has offered to design us a t-shirt

Minutes¶

January 17, 2010 Collective Council Meeting
In attendance: Amy, Will, Jessica, Chris, Morgan.

(we addressed subjects based on who was here to present them.)

Committee Report-backs¶

Communications¶

A computer has been offered to us that sounds like it will work. We still need a mouse and a keyboard.
A project of itemizing parts has begun (Chris? Sorry, I missed some detail here) so that when we strip bikes we have an idea of what to save vs what we have scads of already.
The link from the website to the staffing calendar (in the more prominent position than what we’d had before) will go back to the communication committee for more discussion. Issues involved are (1) not all staffers want the general public to have access to information about their schedules, and while this could be remedied by having staffers sign up with words like “greeter” or “greeter, no key” it’s also true that (2) it’s helpful for us internally to know who’s staffing. Not just in a social sense, but if we see that the same people are staffing over and over, we might be more inclined to sign up, or if we see that someone has signed up but has no key, we might offer to let them in, etc.

Shop committee¶

reportback replaced by review of the shop re-organization plan

The goal is to provide better access to commonly used resources and create better storage. We reviewed the problem areas (water cooler/bottes, pumps, computer, old innertubes, broken containers for small parts, parts that don’t really have a place, ease of use, 3-piece cranks making the work bench area useless, same with storage underneath: competing with bench use. Poor use of space on the sparse grease/lube shelf.)

William addressed pros and cons of shelves vs louvres (sp?) and concluded that shelves will be better for us. (The lourves can exist directly on a wall and offer great flexibility, but we don’t have a wall and can customize the shelving anyway.)

For color-coding the bins, Will tried painting them, but the paint scratched off easily. Maybe we can put vinyl on the fronts.

The bins will cost around $250.00 plus $50.00 shipping.

The library drawers can go above the filing cabinets, assuming the cabinets can take the weight. Research on that information is going slowly.

We may give away the little platic bins (too many broken pieces for us). To CJ?

Jessica brought up that the PVC pipe proposal for organizing cables may just result in the cables coiling up and falling inside the pipe. Will continue to look at options.

The crank storage project (rotating display) still needs some detail filled in (suspension/support? needs to be secured).

Not every item discussed will likely be tackled.

Benefits of the re-organization: access to large bench, easier to see what we have, for small parts it will be easier to distinguish a better variety, and the system will be flexible both wrt reorganization and making replacements.

Build-a-thon follow-up¶

Brian sent an email out saying he’d take the bikes to Keep it Real tonight.

Start a “burn-out” quenching task force¶

We don’t have enough people staffing.
We made big efforts this past summer and fall, offering frequent orientations.
Last winter we did a massive restructuring, tried to address the health of FR.

William’s idea is to gather a group that will attempt to determine what we need to focus on the most. The idea will not be to gather the issues identified by the group members, but to come up with ways to survey the larger freeride community.

We’d like to ask things like
“what do you get back?”
“How do you feel about the community?”
“Does it seem fair?”

We want to get feedback from people who use the shop in different capacities – EAB, kids’ programs, fix for sale work, etc.

The first goal is to determine how to best gather this information.

Reference (book): The Truth about Burnout by Christina Maslach

501( c )(3) Status¶

Morgan has been working with law students at the Duquesne Univ Community Enterprise Clinic in an effort to work toward getting our own 501( c )(3) status.

There are 2 kinds of nonprofits: membership based and not membership based. Most nonprofits are not membership based. Ours would be membership based. The legal structure would not nec have bearing on our actual structure.

Morgan wrote up the bylaws, drawing from the PA nonprofit boilerplate and housing co-ops. He also wrote up a tax document we need called the conflict of interest policy. Morgan will meet with the lawyers on the 22nd, and if everything is in order as far as the structure goes, he’ll post it to the wiki.

The state wants us to have a board of directors, but what it comes down to is that they need certain contact people. Someone to mail correspondence to (president), someone they can contact about our minutes (secretary) and someone they can ask about our finances (treasurer). Morgan is writing things up to make clear that these people have no extra power. So the “facilitator” (president) doesn’t get extra power, but will receive mail, open it and add points to our agenda. The note taker (secretary) is responsible for making sure our minutes get written up and put online, and the treasurer would field questions about our finances.

There is no way around these three offices.

We must have good records, and we’ll formalize the way our minutes are done. They must be clear, and include a list of members present and decisions reached.

We need to articulate what quorum means in collective council. We either have to decide what the minimum number of people present at a meeting is for a decision to be binding, or on a percentage of active council members. (In order to figure out what would be a good percentage, we should determine how many active council members we have. Amy will check the logs and send out an email about this.) Until we’ve done some research, we’ll start with a ballpark of 50 percent for now.

Morgan has included in his work an explanation that we are a member-based non-profit with two types of members, standard and collective council. He replaced “board of directors” with “collective council” where it normally occurs in non-profit documentation.

In order to be a non-profit, you have to be a corporation. In order to be a corporation, you need a name that is uniquely yours and is unambiguous. FreeRide is taken in the state of Pennsylvania, and so Morgan will try to get “Free Ride Community Bicycle Project”, with second choice being “Free Ride Bicycle Project”, and third “Free Ride Pittsburgh”. (I’m not sure if Free Ride should be one word or two – lost that information in taking the notes.) We felt that Free Ride should be the first two words so that it will abbreviate to Free Ride (the name is only really nec in official capacities anyway) and we aren’t able to use the word co-op.

Morgan let us know that he will now begin spending the money that we agreed to allot for this project. (We allotted $1,000. First will be $120 on Friday for filing fees.)

We must advertise in two major circulating papers.

On Friday Morgan will meet with the lawyers as well to make sure the bylaws’ structure is ok, then he’ll post them to the wiki for us to hash out. (Also the tax doc “Conflict of Interest” – he just did a find/replace for FreeRide and changed the “board of directors” instances to “collective council”.

Morgan hopes we can then have our discussion about all the details on the wiki.

Certain things in the bylaws will be very specific, because the law requires that of us. Other things will be very vague because the law allows it, and it gives us more room to function.

We will be required to have an annual meeting where all members are invited.

There will be wording in the bylaws protecting council members from financial liability (unless council members cause the financial liability through fraud).

Hopefully we can get the liability insurance that now covers us (under Bike Pgh) to transfer to our new setup. It should cover us if someone gets hurt in the shop.

All of this work that Morgan is doing should be helpful to other organizations like us facing the same challenges.

Stephen Haynes ( fatherofodin.net ) has offered to design us a t-shirt. We will need it to be single color, single layer.¶

On a slightly related note, it would also be good to know if we have a high res file of our bike-with-wings logo too.