Biketour 2015

Organising Biketour 2015

Autumn meeting

To help make a decision on where the Autumn meeting will be held, please add your suggestions...

1. City
2. Why hold it here?
3. Drawbacks
4. Who to contact

• Lituana

1. Vilnius
2. Venue used before by BT
3. May have to pay for venue
4. Vita (coord 2008)

• Poland:

1. Warsaw
2. BT contact based there
3. Not thinking to go through Poland in BT
4. Olek

1. Poznan
2. Feminist Social Centre

   Central location, cheap buses

3. As above
4. Christabel

• Sweden

1. Malmo
2. Radical Theatre could be used as venue
3. Expensive to get to
4. Zinzi

1. Gothenburg
2. BT participant based there. Female only-anarcho-feminist Sambaband
3. Not accessible especially to those in South
4. Kaise

• Slovakia

1. Bratislava
2. Contact from BT 2014 based there

   More accessible to South/East participants

3. Not a location for BT 2015
4. Michal

• Denmark

1. Copenhagen
2. Large Social Centre just outside and small residential collective inside. Lots going on.
3. Not such an eay location to get to from except Germany/UK - the dominant BT countries!
4. Megan/Tilly

• Finland

1. Helsinki
2. Sambaband. Strong anti-mining movement. Anarchist bookshop/infoshop
3. It's a really awkward/expensive to get there.

New way of organising

In brief, we would suggest that the organising to be DECENTRALISED, made more HORIZONTAL and be more true to the VALUES and COLLECTIVE organisation aspired to on the Biketour itself.

• Open and horizontal group
  • anyone can join (past organisers or

    participants, local and regional contacts etc.). In the best case at

    least 7 people would work together remotely from different locations.

• The organisation process would start as soon as this year's Biketour

  ends so as not to lose momentum and so that there is a longer period of

  time to sort out the tour.

• A start up group of a few people who know now that they wish to be

  part of an organising group would advertise for more people to join the

  group via the BT email lists and in the countries of the BT 2015 (with

  flyers etc). The Autumn meeting will be an opportunity for the group to

  meet and discuss how to go from there. We would propose that to make

  this organisational structure possible, the region will have to be

  decided soon, as well as a date for the Autumn meeting, in order to

  invite people from the region to the meeting and start with the

  collectivisation and decentralising of the organisation. We propose the

  long weekend from the 28th of November to the 1st of December. After the

  Autumn meeting, the preparation of the Biketour would start.

• The work should be split into as small as possible tasks and managed

  in a tasklist, to make it as easy as possible to take on responsibility.

  The online organising could be simplified to one platform (potentially

  Krankenstein).

• Possibly, there could be a rotating system of people responsible for

  overseeing that there are no gaps in organising and for making roles

  clear. This is something that the organisation group would decide.

• The group would communicate regularly online. Due to difficulties with

  the email server this year, the server will have be reviewed.

• Visits could be made to projects/regions
  • funding for this and other

    expenses would be deciding as and when the money is needed, but no EVS

    money would be taken this year.

Region

The suggestion has been made to go to Scandinavia and/or the Baltic states on next year's biketour. Maldova, the Ukraine and Belarus were also suggested as possibilities. If you have any ideas of projects to visit on in these regions, please add them below.

Suggestions for projects to visit next year

Copenhagen - a small residential collective with bike workshop inside the city (Bethlehem collective) and a large cultural and environmental collective outside of the city (Makvarket)

Theme

To be discussed!