This year would have been the 30th birthday of Ecotopia Biketour (1990-2020). However due to the Covid-19 pandemic we have decided to cancel it. Due to the possibility of borders between countries being still partially closed in Summer, or maybe just Schengen Zone from outside, we believe it will be impossible for Ecotopia Biketour to be inclusive for all the possible participants. This uncertainty also paralysed our cooperation with social and ecological initiatives and gatherings in the proposed region and made it difficult to plan our visits. For these reasons, we are not going to do the international bike tour this summer. We want Ecotopia Biketour to live through the coronavirus, but as the rest of the population, we must also adapt to the actual situation. And we really know how to adapt to limited situations.
In our internal organisation we all agreed that it would be impossible to keep the tour as it was planned during the winter meeting: to start from Prague until Timişoara, crossing the territories of so-called Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Romania; due to actual border situation, health measures, political situations and still future uncertainty. Most probably some borders will still (or again) be closed, making the accessibility to Biketour not completely inclusive. This and the fact that we want to contribute in the global health and to be aware of the privilege of many of us to be healthy and be able to move over borders, let us rething our priorities.
However, we want to keep the Ecotopia community alive until next summer. For these reasons, we want to propose that ecotopians will not be centralized in one specific bike tour but take a different form in every place they will be able to gather and it will depend on the conditions of every region or country. We want flyers and posters of Ecotopia being shared everywhere. The Ecotopia Biketour website will be available to update different local calls to action. Our mailing list can work in order to help ecotopians to join the local initiatives, or to discuss further plans. The Biketour blog will be open and willing to share those many different faces and materialisations of 2020 summer experience. And from time to time we will gather in online circles to keep networking, streaming skill-sharing workshops and social media bonfires to keeping growing all together. Soon we will update exactly all the tools we have and that are available to use.
For that reason you are welcome to organize local biketours or to use what you learned traveling with us when joining one. We are offering the Ecotopia tools:
- Ecotopia as a name or brand and our guidelines
- Networking tools: mailing lists, our jitsi server and open collaborative documents
- Facilmap app to organise your routes
- Border situation update document (lets keep it updated for everybody!)
- Page to share different local biketours and Ecotopia blog
- Biketour stickers and the timeless poster (if you are interested in them, send us an email!)
Here are our recommendations for ecotopians to make a local bike tour happen:
- Send an email to our general mailing list or the participant list of the year you joined with your bike tour proposal and that you are looking for other people to join you.
- Write in this pad https://pad.rankenste.in/p/Border_situation_update_2020 about the traveling restrictions in your region to help others to connect.
- Use this map tool https://facilmap.org/ to start planning the tour.
- Use our jitsi server (an open-source platform for making video/voice group chats) https://jitsi.rankenste.in/ to meet online people interested in your tour.
- Use our pads (open-source shared online documents) https://pad.rankenste.in/ to gather useful information (you can make as many pads as you need).
- When you are confident enough that your tour or one that you want to join is going to happen, you can share it with us so that we can post it on our website under 2020-Local bike tours.
- Write a nice blog post(s) that can be shared or published on our web page when you are already rolling!