Bay Area MARC organizes for its
first meeting. Eight riders from around the
greater bay area met at Lyons Restaurant in Newark, CA. Also in
attendance were Ray & Bonnie Davis from the original founding MARC group in southern California.
At the meeting two riders joined
MARC and our local chapter swells to 8 members.
Our Northern
California MARC meeting has been a roaring success.
I came away from the meeting amazed at the quality of the people and
their enthusiastic energy level. It
isn’t often when 10 people gather in a room that they find so much common
interest and congeniality. Clearly,
we are off to a roaring start with this tremendous collection of riders.
For the time being, I will act as the group leader
until we can handle a more democratic decision in the next few months.
My primary interest for the near future is to build group cohesion so
that we can strengthen our core. To
this end, we decided on a few goals:
1.
Meet again at the same place on Sunday, October 8th at
1:00 PM and keep to a regular meeting schedule so others will find us
predictable.
2.
Try and get the meeting moved into a closed area so we don’t need
to use excessive volume as a means of dealing with the restaurant’s
natural QRM.
3.
Create a group poster that will be placed in various places that are
involved in motorcycles or amateur radio. On this poster we will list the name of our group, a few
paragraphs about who we are, what we do and how we are connected to the
original MARC group. We will
also use a local phone number to log and handle the calls, but we will
depend upon the original MARC group to handle any sample newsletter mailings
we might need. To work through
some of the items in this goal, I’ll use an email discussion process for
each item until we have reasonable group agreement.
On our poster, we will use the MARC logo, as it currently appears on
the document that the original MARC GROUP is sending to us this week. Once all the items on this poster have been decided, we will
create the artwork and bring the posters to our next meeting for member
distribution. This poster
display should go a long way to alerting others of our presence.
4.
Actively try to bring other riders to the meeting that we think might
have interest our group.
5.
Create a regional mailing list that is open so that people can test
drive and learn about us before committing more formally.
6.
Publish the pictures taken at the meeting in some manner and create
prints of the group photo captured on digital film.
7.
Not discussed at our last meeting, but presented by one of our
members is to construct a web site that highlights our members and our group
activities. This site will be
linked to the main site so that it shows we are node off the original MARC
group. I like web sites because
they remove time, for the most part, as a limiting problem in communications
and publications are cost capped regardless of the distribution size. It will also allow us to highlight our local membership and
give us a flexible environment to display any “How-To’ and or technical
publications that support out interest.
During our first meeting I wasn’t sure about my
commitment to support the Boy Scout bicycling event the weekend of the next
meeting. After looking at the
date, I can confirm that the Coyote Creek Cycling Classic is on Saturday,
October 7th. This
won’t interfere with our Sunday meeting on the 8th.
If any others in our group would like to participate in this event,
let me know. It is a relatively
easy event on some nice riding roads around the Uvas reservoir in the Morgan
Hill area. Motorcycles are the
best support this event has because we can maneuver around on these country
roads without slowing down the cyclist.
If you’ve not tried to support an event, this is a good event to
start on because it isn’t very long and the kids getting help really
benefit.
Well, that covers the list of items discussed in
our startup meeting. If we can
continue this level of momentum, we can look forward to some great riding
fun.
Aloha,
Roger…
WB1CFQ
