Community » BeWelcome Forum

Ok, well I just joined BW today. I found out about it by stumbling upon the "Hospitality Drama" of OpenCS via the HC group on CS. I joined CS in early january, although I knew about it for a while before, and started going to local meetups. Now OpenCS is a bit hard to follow being mostly biased second party accounts, but I believe I have the gist of the issues. CS and HC are not run to the likeing of 'core volunteers'(I can juge the authenticity of that as I am new to the Hospitality scene), so they left to start what is now BW, correct?  I could go into more but I don't really care too much. I'm fine with there being multiple communities and will participate in the ones that start to have a presence. Although actually being a registered non-profit is nice.

 

No my main question is this, Does BW want to be like/replace CS?

The answer I gathered from OpenCS and the summer vision is yes. So I also have a few more specific questions as the 'summer vision' was a bit vague about the usability/features goals.

The key thing I think that makes a networking site thrive is new signups, which are motivated by usability. Of HC, BW and CS, HC looks like complete crap, BW looks very clean, but CS has all the features and layout. I feel the profiles there are laidout better, and of course it is far ahead in features(although I thought two 'very dedicated members of the tech team from CS left and work on BW via OpenCS) but they've been around longer. I feel that between the two(BW and CS) people will see both, signup, then realise that BW is clunky and that the majority of people are on CS(as even many BW members are part of both I believe).  So really I am wondering, how fast will BW be even half as usable as CS? The top two things I see needed are:

1. A better search.  Find members? That doesn't even make to much sense. If you don't like 'find a couch' then how about, 'Find a place' or 'Meet Locals' or some such.  Also, there is only yes, maybe, no for a couch, where is drinks, and traveling?

2. Verification. It represents safety and security. I would say it should be first, but a better search that utilizes it is necessary first.

3. Minor layout tweaks would be nice. I know I said to main things but owell. The CS front page looks more interesting. CS profiles also seem to flow and seem better organized, BW's feels like a lot of space is wasted.

 

This is a bit of a ramble and I apologize, I may also be completely wrong in my assumptions, and If I am then I will quitely walk away as if nothing happed ;) .

 

 PS - This forum is considerably insulting, I know BW is still in dev but a few notes.  Tags do not belong in forums, Yes Web2.0 is great and exciting, but lets leave features to where they belong, IE blogger and flickr. The Firefox spellchecker also does not work, which is considerably annoying.

HI Allen,

welcome also from my part :)

Thanks for picking up important aspects and actually giving feedback to what you see and read in here - that s exactly what we want and need.

You are right, many volunteers in here have previously worked for HC or CS and came over to do things a different way. I'm not gonna elaborate on background and such, just have a look at www.bevolunteer.org/wiki for more info.

I love that you actually compare BeWelcome to CS - I mean we have 2.600 members and CS nearly half a million... Do you know how CS looked like in its first year of existence? Well, we just celebrated our 1st anniversary and I think for that BW is doing extremely well.

Then, BW is a volunteer place which means that we take time to discuss things and work open source. Features are proposed and worked on all the time, some in here are quite perfectionist. However, the site will (hopefully) never be finished or perfect because I simply enjoy to work for it. But that's my personal problem :D

BW working (yet)? I really think so. I got first requests for meeting up with travellers or destination info already and there have been some very productive real life meetings - mainly volunteer focused as we are still at the beginning. The last of those was late January 08 in Antwerp - you can actually watch a movie and read about it - check the blog (under section "about bewelcome".

You are right, it s important for any kind of community to attract members and grow in numbers. Our decision so far has been to put quality first which means that promotion goes through word by mouth mainly. That's gonna change soon I guess - once new community features are going online :-)

Lot's of things going on here (and also in CS I guess) - you're welcome to join in and help us build exactly the network you would consider perfect :D

Greetings from ST Cugat (Barcelona)
Florian

 

 

I'm not going into the details with this, just a few remarks:

1. Things are coming. They're planned and people are working to implement stuff. It takes time.

2. I find it incomprehensible how you could ever think the CS layout is easy to use or even interesting to use. Too many things on every page, nothing to mark differences between items on pages, tab/menu-structure that makes no sense ... and the list goes on. We should probably put that down to a matter of taste.

3. Tags belong everywhere, they probably just shouldn't replace categories.

Regards
Peter - Fake51

About 2. Verification: it's planned to start the process of verification we designed, during the coming BeVolunteer GA in June.