After sleeping like a crazy woman, I finally feel as if I’ve recovered from a whirlwind weekend.  For 48 hours, Cyclehack hosted cyclists from across the spectrum to explore barriers but more importantly, to create a series of cyclehacks to make their experiences on the bike better. You can see our Storify board here to get a flavour of this amazing experience.

And boy did they come up with ideas!! You can see them in our brand new Cyclehack Open Source Catalogue. This included our group in Glasgow, in addition to those cyclehacking in Melbourne and Beirut.  We have vinyl bus wraps, adaptations to style, cycling design principles, bike beats, DIY mud guards, initiatives for new cyclists, campaigns to increase awareness of bike safety, and even a total reinvention of how we view our handlebars (GPS, better bells, and signals!).

And the people! It was great to meet all kinds of folks with amazing skill sets, passion for cycling and smarter cities, and basically, who are just good fun. Everyone was helping each other out and encouraging ideas – it was a special community of people and I can’t wait to see that grow.

But my biggest take-aways aren’t just these people and a very cool catalogue of great ideas which folks from all over the world can benefit from.  On the first night, co-founder Sarah encouraged cyclehackers to DO, to prototype and try ideas out in the wild.  We had the help of lovely people like Richard and his team from MAKlab and supplies from Sugru and Bare Conductive to actually realise some of these ideas.

I think this encouragement to ‘do’ not only changes the way we look at barriers and how we design and develop ideas, but this changes the way we view our own potential.  I think we often get caught up in the ‘what ifs’, the wait for funding, the safety of the same way of doing things, the permission to try an idea (this is a big one for me). Just do.

And that’s exactly what this group did and over a very quick two days, they planted loads of seeds to ideas which are already growing – Penny in Your Pants and We Love Bikes are two examples of that.

With the new dates set for 19-21 June 2015 and an invitation for others to join the Cyclehack network, our Cyclehack experiment has been a success and is a great example of  how ‘doing’ is a great way to build a dynamic community and make change.