Team meeting: we had a productive and refreshing walk around JPond, followed by chili turkey hosted at Ye's place. During our meeting, Miranda showed us the new PN2K bright green neon stickers recently designed. We love them, and we hope you will, too!
We did a bit of brainstorming on how we might want to revise MIT PN2K's activities to reflect our mission and better serve the growing number of PN2K members we have. One problem has been that bike events require large-scale organization and requires everyone helping to be available. Volunteers who aren't working full-time (aka students) are often flooded by MIT homework and psets and unable to commit to organizing monthly large scale events. Even more importantly, bike problems happen spontaneously-- sometimes requiring immediate attention (e.g., bike brakes not working, flat tire, etc.). As frequently as our bike events are held, timing-wise, they are still suboptimal since a cyclist cannot just email us to receive immediate help (in which case, they are once again forced to either wait it out until our next bike event or take their bike to a shop and pay $40-$100+ for their repairs (in which case, they throw up both hands in exasperation and yell, "Why do I bike??!") Well, that's not what we want.
So, Yaoming gave us his idea, which essentially boils down to this:
PN2K hires bike professionals (or recruits bike savvy individuals) who would train a focus group of 10-15 "bike apprentices." These apprentices would go through several steps of bike repair and safety training. They would learn about PN2K, basic bike safety repairs, practice tons (on the bikes we have in the office), then help others under the guidance and supervision of these professionals. This process leads to the possibility for our apprentices to obtain a PN2K Bike Safety certification. These bike apprentices then become our instructors who train the next generation of bike apprentices. As we increase the number of PN2K certified bike safety instructors, we can hold regular and flexible "office hours" in our PN2K office. For our PN2K members, this means you don't have to wait for 30 days or until the next bike event for your regular bike needs.
We have a few people already interested in being part of the training process. If you are someone who knows bike skills and would like to be part of the first generation of trainers, subscribe to our mailing list so you're kept in the loop with everyone that's going on.
Keep Calm & Pedal On~