[TheThinkTank] Do you have something for me to do?.........

[Rich Points]

I like the idea of mastering skills rather than hours.  I sometimes 
worry that people are going through EAB and not really learning all that 
much.  We tend to direct them towards chores and they'll learn whatever 
those chores dictate.  My sense is that the majority of people who've 
earned a bike at our shop would not know how to fix a flat. 

We've tried what Doug suggested by giving mini lessons to EABers in the 
shop.  This has been largely hit or miss based on who's in the shop and 
what's going on on any given day.

I guess the bigger questions here are 1) how can we ensure that EABers 
are gaining valuable skills and 2) run our shops in a way that keeps the 
doors open and the staff/volunteers happy and productive?

To make the skill mastering method work the shop would need to be able 
to provide any task at any given time.  And I suspect all the 
collectives out there are limited by space in some way.

We could probably make the skill method work by shuffling bikes between 
our three storage units and the shop but it would be a huge drain on 
staff, probably not worth it.

Space seems to be the problem, how do we solve it?

Rich
> We currently require 12 hours of volunteer time to earn a bike, but I 
> have been considering proposing that we scrap the hours requirement 
> and make it more of a basic skills mastery thing (patch flat, adjust 
> brakes, adjust derailleur, etc.).  We use our 'yellow bikes' at our 
> shop as learning tools for folks to build up their skills, then just 
> release the bikes to the streets for anyone to use.  This teaches 
> folks basic bike repair, creates a final diversion of these bikes from 
> the landfill, and helps folks with no other means of transport to get 
> around.
>
> jennifer
> austin yellow bike project
>