Groups » BewelcomeLV

Good to have this discussion(s) started on a larger scale!

 

Just posting again, what I already posted in the BV forum some time ago:

 

[quote author=claudiaab link=topic=1277.msg9640#msg9640 date=1193912311]
Great to see something happening in this area!!! Pierre, thanks for taking the initiative!

Eva had a good idea about better organizing groups of Local Volunteers in one city. Maybe giving them the possibility to assign specific tasks to themselves could also help:

LV1 --> helping you find accommodation in short notice / emergency cases
LV2 --> organizing the monthly meeting in pubs of the city
LV3 --> providing tips and info on what to see, where to go
LV4 --> contact person for female travellers in emergency
LV5 --> welcoming new members
LV6 --> forum presence


[/quote]

@annabelgium :

 you are making perfect sense.

I remember a similar experience in CS (I won't mention the city hehe) where 'normal' members were critized by one of the Local Volunteers for organizing a meeting that was taking place around the same time as one of HIS meetings :)

He actually accused the member of 'dividing' the CS group (because some people were not coming to HIS meeting but preferred to go to the other 'less official' one.

This of course does not mean that I do not support the idea of some kind of hierarchy (it is always good to have at least some members who take this seriously and will do their best to organize a meeting efficiently). But we should also (like you suggest) leave room for own initiatives.

 

what is this obsession with organizing? the discussion is organized into pre-digested topics, which means that the owners are telling the plebs what to think about.

 

That is upside down, inside out and back wards and not one whit different than HC/Cs: the inner dictate to the members what to work on, and decide what is important and set the rules. What happened to volunteer based? this is in no way volunteer based. Some boday is there determining all the discussions before the discussion is even opened.

 

Volunteers locally have to be able to know each other first. local voiunteers have to learn from each other what the local needs are: that is volunteer based.

 

There is no zero nothing here which makes local volunteers independant actors: any local volunteer is only attached to a vertyicle structure and is by definition and by desiugn someone who answers to someone upstairs.

 

Not OPEN, not Democratic and definietly not community: the exact same thing as CS/HC only the hype has changed 

Then what do you suggest? How would you do things and will you then provide the manhours required? All I see is a typical open situation where naturally a structure has been created by those most involved like with anything else in the world. The nice thing here is that ostensibly people have a say which they don't have in HC/CS. This is a virtual community, so what else do you expect than that few people get involved with contributing to something intangible, isn't that simply inherently the problem with people getting organised through the internet? If you can find enough people to agree with you -and- also to put in the required time to do the organising / programming then we can truly test if Bewelcome is like the "Vatican Curia"...

 

I feel that so far you are just discouraging people. By setting a structure as far as I can tell nobody is imposing their will, they're just trying to create something to work with, again because this is a virtual community and we cannot spontaneously come together on the town square. If you are so dissatisfied with the result after a year then why haven't you come with workable suggestions and carried them out in your home town? And if your initiative is succesful but still rejected by BW you will have proved your point, I however seriously doubt that would happen.

Great.

Side note: It reminds me of the phone system that Joe implemented for CS.  The code is still lying around somewhere and can be revived and made running on BeWelcome at some point in the future.

The mock-up.

Possible main menu for Telephone Surfing:

"Welcome! There are X surfers online, and Y on the phones. Z people are surfing couches tonight."

• Press 1 if you need a place to stay tonight.
• Press 2 if you you'll need a place to stay in the future.
• Press 3 to invite local people for coffee or discussion.
  • Press 1 for coffee
  • Press 2 for beer
  • Press 3 for discussion
  • Press 4 for a dance party
  • Press 5 for prayer
• Press 4 to annouce an impromptu gathering.
• Press 5 to announce a global moment of silence.
• Press 6 to update your location on the global map, or to make a trip report.
• Press 7 to spend five minutes in the global telephone chatroom.
• Press 8 to check your couchsurfing.com email.
• Press * to turn on/off alerts, or to sign up to answer questions from strangers via phone.
• Finally, press 911 if you want immediate help from strangers nearby.

 

@guaka,

sorry, I don't see the connection of the phone system with this discussion.. but anyway, good idea!

 

@ "But are LV really needed?"

For my taste, not really.

On the other hand, I have never run into conflicts with any local volunteer or ambassador so far. And I guess most of them are quite ok persons. So, for people who expect to find someone like that, why not have them..

 

@ Isa,

I am sorry, I totally skipped your long posts, as I noticed it's so much to read in total.

But I notice you have a point, the wiki article does really sound a lot top-down. But like many things written in our wiki, it's never really clear if this is written by just "someone", or if it's agreed policy. In this case, I would say, it's rather a private opinion, and the last word is not at all spoken (as these discussions show) - or did I miss something?.

Could be that other wiki articles are more worth to complain about.. if you find one, say so!

 

-----

 

Idea 

We forget about local volunteers, and instead we make groups that allow a democratic structure within that group - so members living in a city can join a group and vote someone to be called "local volunteer" or whatever they like.

"the wiki article does really sound a lot top-down."

That is a propsal! Nothing more and nothing less! Its a Wiki article so everyone can change it. 

Sorry Isa but I can t follow you at all. We are asking for participation and wish nothing more then that. Thats why we tried to structure the discussion and put our cents into it already in order not to just send you a message saying:

"Hey you we would love to start BeLocal. Please tell us your ideas"

I belived that we ve got to draw a concept of what we understand when we talk about BeLocal. But thats just our ideas. So please - bring something into the discussion. 

Following Isa proposal, in order not to impose predigested ideas and realize a top-down process hiden behing a supposed participative conversation where it's absolutely forbidden to answer to another thing that what is proposed, where you can not open another topic, where you are censored if you show a different view - it's the situation here, right? - I will not tell any word, so I can't be acused of imposing ideas.

Ay, it's seing the thing very negatively!

I'm happy that all the people answering the BeLocal conversations are doing it 
following only at a low level the scheme proposed by the conversation but 
bringing lots of new idea, like the one that LV are not needed!

Personally I kind of support the idea expressed here that "we don't need LV"
but in the way that "we don't need to put a LV sticker on a member so he's
contributing to local activities (and other things)". It would be good to get out of
LV/ambassadors stickers, but I always thought that it's a way for some
members to get a kind of "status" motivating him to assume some kind of
responsibilities - doing a good job.
Maybe the key would be in Fabian proposal to realize it as a group, not being 
a local volunteer but a member of the active-local-group? 
This is again a kind of fronteer with the "normal" member who indeed should be invited to realize all the "LV activities". But let's be realist: will all the members participate in these "LV activities"? If they wish to, won't they wish to join a group/page active-local-group? (this doesnt have to be a complicated application but a simple click)

I finish with Julien+ Andreas proposal: democratic group. I would not make
emphasis on democratic; would better tell anarchich with some guidelines
trying to bring fairness. I hardly imagine some elections etc. (maybe you
don't mean it) but more some ad-hoc friendly organization 

about "democracy" - let's say, if some group wants to run democratic procedures, we can provide some simple tools for that (a simple poll feature could be enough). A typical example could be "Who should be the group moderator?".

But, I agree this will usually work much better without democratic procedures.

counting posts in a group or forum would probably miss many.

That might be true. My experience (which is very limited as well) shows that the locally active organisers and mostly as well hosters are quite acitve. I totalyl agree that we would not get all the locally active members that way but I would say the majority. Maybe thats just my personal impression...

 Anyway ... just an idea...

@peterw, the "man hours requiered" is mesuring people as a comodity, to escape from corporate ways we have to escape from new-speak / new-think.
      "naturally a structure has been created by those most involved like with anything else in the world."
Nature is actually much richer with possibilitys.
   Autonomous movements have been up against this particular problem for ages : when-ever there are more than 50 people involved the internal structure colapses (everybody identifying freely with each other) and a directive elite arises with the typical Main party / opposition / sheep / out-to-lunch social divisions and identities. The have made progress none the less :
    _Organize information globaly (each group publishing a bulitin to keep others informed) with large scale debate and NO decistions or power or authority and active groups on usefull scale : most often only the people interested in a very specific subject, and they only constitute a group for the time it takes to do their action. So they stay in solid identitys.
    _Make the whole structure less formal, so that people are less tempted to forgo their personal souverenity, and think for themselfs rather than thinking as a mass. This is a conditioned reflex. Every time an elite is formed in the social tissu, they should STOP trying to go foward and make it their role to educate the others until the democratic (or consensuel) process can continu. It makes NO sense to decide for others when you would like them to live up to it. STOP thinking that whatever we're doing is more important and urgent than having understanding with the people we're with !

@pietshah  "a way for some members to get a kind of "status" motivating..."
That's thinking for them, no ? Look, I understand that you're into making thing work, and apreciate that you like the evolved-democracy and roots-to-branches philosophies...     But when you think about "motivating" people and tools to do so you are treating them as children, without teaching them to grow up.
     ...definitly think meritocracy stinks, glad we're veering away. Isn't the fundamental difference between an "Ambasidor" and a "volonteer" that a volonteer is just willing to help ! Much healthier principle. So if a member volonteers to help "emergencys" his coordonates will be on a local emergency page, maybe he can have an icon in his profile, and that looks like enough. For the hospit side anayway...

====
I had tought that LV's would evolve into something more socialy active than just cartering to the needs of the hospit network, I mean, there are social issues all over, and so BIG global ones as well, and all our better-democracy and such is really more in this vein. The question is : do local groups need a central network ? Well there are a lot that don't, and many that are working up to it (creating, cross-referencing, and merging local networks), so this idea of taking a global network and putting it at their disposal...    have to really listen. Also most of us only think of BeWelcome as a hospitality exchange. It takes someone who has experience in social networking and activisme to see that our interest in better-democracy and such is really a distinguising attribute  that deserves to be recognized : it's not just about hospit. ; it's about (it could be about) humanisme, openness, anti-racisme, anti-alienation and general non-violent social change. So 3000, are we, well are you with me on this one ?

If we go that way, then we should start be looking up local groups and asking them if they want to interact with us. I know most political and artistic squats will be in right away, they've been doing hospit the hard way for ever all ready. And there's lots of more or less informal local groups for social change that could really benifit from knowing what's working or not for other groups, etc. 3000 is really a small amount of people, and I for one havn't actually used the hospit side yet : people open their doors even when they aren't on networks. Are into bringing people together, or are we just a better hospit network. I mean, if the world evolves enough for us all to consider other people as human beings, the whole hospit idea is out-dated. Do we want to be better (important) or help things become better ?

@brndanleo:

Your idea of integrating the existing non-genuine-hospex groups/organizations makes me thing of a simple approach to promote this way of hospitality exchange:

- We could try to integrate local "places/initiatives" into our website. It would be more something like an "advise" that everyone can create and map to a certain location (can be vague or precise).

- E.g. in our country-application (www.bewelcome.org/country) we could show these initiatives aswell, next to the members. As an example for the technical side of this, consider looking at:

http://www.dopplr.com/place/fr/paris/tips

 (but note we wouldn't focus on everything but on hospitality exchange related stuff...)

 

@All: Although I like a grass-roots approach on this, I don't think we can handle groups without group-administrators in general. Featuring a post will be impossible without a moderator who can select the post and "unfeature" it again after an event is over e.g. For these administrators we should also provide ways for voting/changing the group-administrator if wanted.

BUT I think we could live without local administrators (that means administrators of a local "location"-group). We still could have local volunteers then, only they would pick this job themselves and would only show "initiative" as Pierre-Charles proposed.

OK, i've been following all these "local volunteer" threads for some time now. I feel i can post some ideas now.

I wanted to see what other people have to say, and then try to add something from another (my) point of view.

 I like the idea of having free to use database. Like a "Hopitality Knowledge Repository" as a wiki or watever works better. This can be organized with several paralel structures, being geographic just one of them.

About "volunteers". I would like to scratch first what i think can be understood as a posible definiton for this word. I can imagine that some members have some extra time in their hands, and they feel they could use bewelcome as a tool to invest that time in several tasks, done voluntarily (does this word exist?) :P  

Then, this "volunteers" could have this tasks they do inside BW but somewhat being able to integrate them with other similar tools, available outside this network-website.

One task might be this "knowledge database" that has information, that anyone can edit. Some people might want to volunteer to be admins or moderators, or watever role helps to organize and improve this database.  This is an online task, wich is only one side of the "volunteer's taks" spectrum.

You also might have the more "local" tasks. I remeber someone said a list of posible tasks, that list helped me to start thinking:

"helping you find accommodation in short notice / emergency cases" this could be done by an horizontal global emergency group. You ask help, and they point you to the closest available "volunteer" among this groups of members, who are willing to invest some time in this particular task. This could also aply for:  "contact person for female travellers in emergency" and maybe not only female, just plain human beings :)

 "providing tips and info on what to see, where to go" this could be done with the database i mention before, let it be a wiki, or something else.

As i have read "welcoming new members" should be something anyone can do. Maybe having a "new member signup near me" alert system could help those really focused on doing only this task.

"organizing the monthly meeting in pubs of the city" I'm sure there will be someone willing to "volunteer" on doing this, i dont see any help needed more than a calendar or forum or so.

This is getting long, maybe i got lost in my thoughts. Anyway, I was thinking all these "tasks" can be organized in kind of a "grid". I imagine this "crossword" like grid. Where vertical columns are countries or cities, and horizontal rows are this tasks. If someone needs to find a "volunteer" nearby on a specific task, they look into "the grid" and find them. This very basic idea, could be probably done in other most fashionable way, like tags as someone else suggested.

 To sumarize: we have a "grid" of "volunteers" and we have a "database" with information. This couple of tools could be the "online" virtual support, for this human network of souls, willing to give some time "volunteering" for BW comunity, and by extension, to the world.

I hope i made myself clear. Thank you for your time and patience :) 

 

You mean there's some other LV group than this one? Because I've subscribed to BewelcomeLV recently without any problems.

agree, a LV icon on profile would be nice, so that people could know who is a LV and can turn to, when needed.

@Leo
yeah, I think you're probably right. And anyways, the moderators of the groups are already separated from the normal members. This should be enough.

Please do not add any gratification badge.

Please do not give more power to any users (moderators is already too much, I would prefer to have community moderation).

@sammiekong : "Not trying to be caviled, but if nobody needs to know who is a LV, then this name doesn't need to exist at all. We who are volunteering don't need this name ourselves. So why we made something called "Local Volunteer"?" 

Good point. One advantage of using the term Local Volunteer is that we can have a group like this here and the volunteers can exchange ideas and expertise. What kinds of meetings worked, how can you activate the local community etc.