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Big BW event in Toulouse, France! Read all about it!

In the Northern Hemisphere we are slowly saying goodbye to spring and welcoming summer. That is probably the reason why the people from Toulouse, France are inviting us to join them during the SeekTheDuck event: a BeWelcome meeting hosted by a duck mascot that will take place between May 31and June 2 2013

There are lots of events on the agenda: discovering Toulouse’s many bars, a workshop creating/painting mölkky, local winetasting, a huge barbecue, walks and bicycle rides, Seek The Hidden Wine Bottles and much more (including Easter omelettes BBQ-style)

The event is open, free and the local population are looking forward to hosting you

You can register and find the complete programme here: SeekTheDuck Activity Planner

And while you’re at it, why don’t you join the Event Group: Seek The Duck - BW Toulouse Event

Toulouse is waiting for you!

Over the past months of rapid growth, it has become obvious that the engine that currently drives BeWelcome will reach the end of its life soon. Thus, plans were made to start with a clean slate and rebuild from scratch.

It is now time to announce that Welen has passed the modelling stage and the coding has begun. If you are a coder, this is probably the time where you want to get on board because the early stages are likely to be the most fun.

Welen is built on top of the PHP framework Symfony and the frontend will make use of a number of standard components like Bootstrap, jQuery and LESS. We would love you to join us, no matter what your skill is. Particularly, useful would certainly be

• UI/UX specialists
• frontend developers
• PHP developers

However, do not hesitate to offer whatever other skill you think you could contribute.

To find out more about the project, have a look at the project pages or contact jsfan.

Hi all,

the dev team just released a new version of the software that drives BeWelcome.

• This release includes one long awaited feature: Activities. Checkout the feature here: http://www.bewelcome.org/activities 
• The other big change is that there is now a landing page which shows you posts to groups and the BW forum in separate lists. During testing people said they like it better than the old setup and other said the old setup was less confusing. So please add your voice (either as a comment or start a discussion in the BW forum) so that we can decide if we should revert this change or keep it.
• For people that prefer there privacy we added better support for SSL.
• For the list of your forum posts you can now decide to show it to other members while in the past it was always visible to everyone.
• The mails send in case of a subscriptions now show the username of the poster as sender instead of BeWelcome and the subject was streamlined a bit.

The full list of changes can be found in Trac.

Thanks to everyone who supported this endeavor,
shevek

Last weekend (6-7 April 2013), a BeWelcome unconference took place in Bamberg, Germany. The participants discussed about the introduction of a "New Member BeWelcome Team", how to activate inactive members, and many more topics.

The meeting minutes have just been published here: http://www.bewelcome.org/wiki/Bamberg_Unconference_April_2013_MeetingMinutes.

The previous unconference took place from 1-3 March, 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. Important topics were the decision making on BeWelcome, member saftey, and the structure for groups and forum.

The meeting minutes are available at http://www.bewelcome.org/wiki/BXL_Unconference_March_2013_MeetingMinutes.

An unconference is participant-driven meeting that avoids the worst aspects of a conventional conferences such as high fees, sponsored presentations and top-down organization. At an unconference, the agenda is typically created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim time and a space, and thereby such meetings often feature open discussions rather than having a single speaker at the front of the room giving a talk. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference)

If you would like to organize a BeWelcome unconference, please post your suggestions here: http://www.bewelcome.org/forums/s4627-Organizing_a_BW_Unconference

Another month - another release.

There are lot of places where you can select a language on BeWelcome. In the past, these lists were rather confusing because they were not sorted alphabetically. Now we have changed the sorting to make it easier to find the langauge you are searching for and we added a few languages that were missing before.

You might have seen the discussion about gender in the forum. You can now select 'other' as a gender in case neither 'male' nor 'female' suits you. Regardless of your choice you can always hide your gender from being shown on your profile or in the search results. (Just edit your profile summary accordingly.)

A feature that was well hidden in the menu on the left side of each profile page moved to a more prominent place: 'Add a note'. If you visit a profile you can save a note about it for your personal use. On your own profile you can see all your notes.

On the message pages you can now see 20 messages instead of 7 per page and if you ever wanted a reply button on top of the message display, now you've got it. The message text is in a better readable format as well.

If you care for your privacy you're probably happy to hear that another place where your username was shown to the public even if you decided to have a non-public profile is now gone.

Do you wonder what this blue pin in the forum overview is all about by now? It shows you that a forum thread was fixed on top of the forum overview because it was deemed important.

For the full monty see the changelog.

Many thanks to abyssin, beatnickgr, bikepunk, crumbking, dima42, feuerdaemon, globetrotter_tt, guaka, james_oder_dave, jsfan, lantti, lemon-head, mahouni, mattoz, midsch, mikael, pablobd, philipp, planetcruiser, shevek, sitatara, timloal, and toub for all their help.

If you find errors, please post them in the bugs group. If you have a suggestion to improve things, please post in the feature requests group.

Cheers,
shevek

Well, if you're as picky as I can be, you will probably point out it's been 3 weeks.