Thinktank

A live, current electronic mailing list used to ask questions and post exciting news about community bike shops. The list is populated by current and past volunteers, staff, organizers, and board members of community bike shops around the world going back almost two decades. Joining the mailing list and participating in the discussion is free and simple, and the sign-up page for the list is here. The lingua franca of the list is primarily English, but posters originate from a wide variety of countries and states in North and South America and Europe.

The ThinkTank Archive

Bikecollectives.org maintains an archive of past contributions to and discussion at the ThinkTank mailing list. The archive collects messages and topics going all the way back to 2006, making it a valuable trove of information for research.

Searching the Archive

The ThinkTank archives are searchable, and can be found here. For those who make use of browser search plugins, there is also a search plugin here that has been tested working on Mozilla Firefox. It may or may not work with Chrome or other browsers.

Searching as a way to use the ThinkTank more effectively

It may be prudent to search the archives before posting a new topic to the ThinkTank; over the years much has been discussed on a wide variety of topics relevant to community bike shops.

For instance, a quick search for "liability", a frequent topic introduced by those new to the list and in the process of starting new collectives, cooperatives, or just community-run shops in general, yields 37 pages of previous discussion, a great deal of which is redundant. A search for "insurance" yields 52 pages of discussion, though due to new insurance companies coming into existence and old ones exiting, that discussion over time may be more or less relevant depending on age.