Soon you will be able to read about the upcoming biketour on http://www.ecotopiabiketour.net, where you can also subscribe for joining the tour..

For now we are only beginning to organise this years' tour, and to do so we are looking for people that can help us with finding places and regional issues of interest, and people who have the time and motivation to help organizing the biketour for specific parts of the tour. Please forward this to anyone who you think might able to help us, and write us if you think you could be a national coordinator this year.

CALL OUT FOR NATIONAL COORDINATORS OF THE 2009 ECOTOPIA BIKETOUR
We are looking for national coordinators (NC's) for Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.


These NCs will be responsible for the coordination of the part of the route through their country, and play an active role in for example:
- planning and testing their part of the route
- finding sleeping places, actions, events, identifying co-organizers, participants
- keeping contact with volunteers and international coordinators
- press work and help on BT-publicity (flyer, poster, press-releases)
- if needed, aid with visa applications for biketour participants
- guiding the tour


As you see it's a voluntary job with a lot of responsibility. Search of actions/places of interest, building contacts and testing the route is all time consuming. Some experience with environmental actions, or having an environmental network in your country, or certain biking experience would there- fore definitely help - but these qualities can come from different people. It's anyway probably the best if the job is shared among 2 people or a small group, and if tasks are delegated or shared with other volunteers. Finally the NC has to communicate with all that are involved (local language & English), keep a planning and have regular contact with the international coordinators (mostly email, skype).


Luckily the international coordinators of this year (us) could start pretty early in the year and do the job with 2, which gives us time to get more involved, get more into actions, meet people and visit some of the places in advance. So though it's important that all of the organizing is done – we could help out with it too.

One thing we now work on is trying to get funding to be able to reimburse expenses of national coordinators, and though it isn't guaranteed, we are trying to to find some money to compensate the NC's as well.

For a more detailed guideline for National Coordinator visit :
http://btwiki.ecobytes.net/Checklist_for_national/local_organisers and
http://btwiki.ecobytes.net/National_Coordinator


OTHER HELP OR TIPS WELCOME
Of course other tips or help is also welcome:


Like we said before, if you have information on places of interest related to climate change in the countries we go through (Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia) or if you know about actions, campaigns, groups and individuals that are busy on these topics in the region, place tell us about it! If you know people who would like to get involved, please send them our info.


For now we could for example use help with translation for the web info in Albanian, Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian


All the best and hope to see you on the biketour!
Peddle on happy! Daniël and Marcha

contacts: marcha.peelen@czzs.org or daniel.meijers@czzs.org