Agenda¶

Can we adopt the practice of always checking in with unknown greeters?*

How about (also) a sign-in sheet?*

What qualifies as volunteering? Or what doesn’t? Working on your bike? Helping your friend (who came with you) work on their bike? etc.*

Do we have any conduct rules for the shop? If not, advice on calling people on disruptive/dangerous behavior?*

How do you deal with someone who’s being disrespectful/dishonest/otherwise difficult? Any thoughts on actually throwing someone out?*

Can we talk about making a stronger effort to be consistent in the policy we present and enforce?*

*These are the abbreviated versions of concerns I (Amy) developed after recent staffing. More detail (tries to make link) here.

Partial Minutes¶

(from Amy)

I’m going to try to cover what happened at least with regard to my list above.

We decided that we’ll have a sign-in sheet and that upon signing in, people should also be verbally checking in with the greeter.
The items on the sign in sheet are to be determined (I’ll put up another post where people can weigh in on that) but I think we’re figuring name/ time entering/ what you’re doing today (volunteering, working on your bike, EAB? hanging out, whatever)/ member?/ toolbox?/ $2?

We can also include, for people who say they’ve come to volunteer, what they’re figuring on doing. This gives us a chance to make sure it’s actually volunteer work they’re claiming volunteer hours for. (This was in response to the problem of people coming in with their friends and claiming time spent helping (only) their friends work on their bikes. We can offer these people the idea of circulating and helping anyone who needs it, which would count, or just helping their friend(s) but not claiming the hours.) The greeter will have discretion making this call.

As implied above, it’s been verified that working on your own bike (or strictly that of a few friends) doesn’t rate volunteer hours.

It was suggested that if someone is being disruptive or creating a safety issue etc., and if we have the time/energy to deal with them (as opposed to sending them away) one option would be to assign them to the bike stand closest to the front desk area. This might include asking someone already there to move to another stand. There were ideas presented of sort of grounding the person at that stand, as in “ask me if you need any tools that aren’t in your toolbox.”

Some concerns were raised that we need to tread lightly here, because giving the greeter this kind of authority feels like it goes against the ideas of everyone being equal that FR is built upon. At the same time, there have been enough (sufficiently disturbing) instances of people taking advantage of that openness that we felt we needed to create some mechanisms for keeping this sort of thing in check. Our hope and expectation is that this interaction at the front desk will significantly affect very few people who use FreeRide. It seems that most people are already on board with the whole mutual aid and respect thing, and most people who volunteer are truly giving back to FR when they do.