Hello all. Recently a friend and follower of this project posted a comment under one of my previous posts. I felt the comments made were very important and deserved to be brought to the attention of others. I think it will be a good catalyst to stir up some conversation. Please express yourselves fully and feel free to agree or disagree or offer new perspectives.
-Ryan
Hello Ryan, congratulations on your wonderful project and sorry for my very long over-due comments. As I had mentioned, I am going to treat this feedback opportunity out of the context of your school project and approach it on its overall merits. So, for you and your readers, please ignore irrelevant points in my comments. Sorry that my comments may not directly contribute to your project in terms of identifying specific locations for you to include on your map. Also please bear with me as I am trying to offer constructive comments, as ineffective as I may be in explaining my ideas.
This is a great idea and is worth taking into serious consideration by all levels of public and private sectors, including municipal, provincial and federal governments, as well as various industries and non-profit organizations.
Encouraging citizens to take active parts in generating renewable energy and saving the environment is one of the most important components of ideal plan to protect our environment and contribute to all overall well-being.
One of the most intriguing aspects of your project is its immediately realistic and accessible means of action and participation by all parties involved. If I understand your project correctly, it will allow and empower everyone who can use a bike and has access to one to generate measurable units of clean electricity to be used by publicly frequented venues and entities. This in turn, one would expect to lead in local community development- all very worthy results to seek.
But, one of the limitations of your proposed concept in its current format, is that it is inviting participants to also support their favourite local commercial businesses by offering them units of clean electricity they have created through pedalling their bikes.
What maybe a significant point to consider is as soon as people are capable of something useful for others, that thing will automatically bear an inherent value, even if it may not have cost the producer a penny to create it. Possessing something of value is, of course, empowering for the owner, and may result in a range of positive or negative consequences for others, depending on how that owner uses her or his “thing” of value.
I understand that because your objective is to promote community building through sharing cleanly produced and useful electricity power, you would expect people to willingly and generously offer the energy they create to local select entities. But things may not be quite as straight forward as we wish.
In the bigger scheme of things (saving the planet), and specially when we’re dealing with those already impassioned by protecting the environment, it is certainly possible to find people who are willing to contribute anything they can anywhere possible to play their part.
However, in order to include everyday public and inspire them to take an active role in connecting to their communities through creating some of their required electricity, we need to consider no matter how selfless communities members may be, they still need to feel that they too are getting something good out of what they offer others.
One might assume people would already feel satisfied by knowing that first their biking has contributed to their health, two, that they were going to bike anyway, and three of course they are reducing consumption of energy. But, I imagine the human nature would want to have more and more options. Even though, it all appears to be selfless cause, people need to connect tangible results to what already means something to them. For example, I may go to Yoga at a far away YMCA, therefore, I may feel more inspired about giving my units of electricity to them as opposed to the Safeway Store in my community. This is not to say supporting Safeway would be wrong. But, considering all the political and socio-economic factors involved in choosing who to support who not to support, I imagine people would be more willing to support organizations more linked to enhancing people’s well-being and less linked to polluting the environment with their business.
I suspect, much like donations people make to non-profit organizations, for your project too, they would not mind making personal sacrifices, as long as they know what they offer is used by a responsible organization and toward worthy causes. The local community building in this case could really take a secondary priority. People need to feel passionate about supporting an entity, regardless where that entity maybe, on their street or 20 kilometres away from them.
If this project was being proposed by the city of Vancouver, and they needed community consultation feedback, I would suggest that they start with a small scale pilot project involving a considerable number of main non-profit organizations, community centres and Volunteer Vancouver to facilitate match-making.
In fact, I would strongly encourage and support you to approach the City of Vancouver and present your project as a very viable means to create clean energy. They could sponsor required equipment for non-profit organizations to convert offered units of power, to distribute required devices to volunteer bikers and to fund Volunteer Vancouver to coordinate matching appropriate number of volunteers with participating organizations.
Of course, your people generating power idea is replicable anywhere, any time, and works for all public and private organizations. But, a realistic start would be a pilot.
Hope you would find these lengthy comments helpful. Thanks for inviting me to share my feedback on your exciting project. Good luck and happy graduation to you.
by Hamid April 29, 2010 at 9:51 pm edit comment
