Group BeWelcome communications

planetcruiser

posted 2011/06/20 08:17 Visibility: World by planetcruiser
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by planetcruiser

hello everyone,

after many months i am checking back on bewelcome, just to see what's going on. so, what's currently cooking? is a meeting or a release being prepared? what are the ups and downs of the recent months? where is help needed the most? and don't just say "bug fixing" please. ;)

i am working full-time in hamburg at the moment, but towards the end of the year i want to do some travelling again, and it would be nice to do a "trip powered by bewelcome", maybe even do some outreach along the way.

i know numbers can be deceiving, but how did membership (weekly signups, logins) develop? there used to be a "total members" number somewhere, but i don't seem to find it any more.

also, where apart from here and #bewelcome on freenode are volunteers talking? is there a mailing list that's (more) active?

cheers!

matthias

posted 2011/06/20 17:45 Visibility: World by matthias
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by matthias

hey planetcruiser,

nice to hear from you again. it looks like bewelcome is cooking on a low flame, but still cooking. so far no meetings are prepared, though the next GA should be prepared soon.

a big down was the developer server outage for many weeks, so all mailing list communication was interupted, feedback could not be answered and many links were broken.

luckily all systems are running again, but another down is that BeWelcome needs more people getting involved in all fields, "bug fixing" has still a high priority.

i am also afraid that the "communication team"does not exist anymore and it seems there is nobody at the moment who feels responsible.

the link "members online" was removed sometime ago, because it was so depressing to see only a very few members online at the same time. If you are still interested, you can see it here: http://www.bewelcome.org/online

i think volunteers are mostly talking here in the forum, sometimes by one-on-one chats.

there were some malilinglists: http://bewelcome.org/mailman/listinfo

but only the developer list http://bewelcome.org/mailman/listinfo/bw-dev-discussion used to be active.

planetcruiser

posted 2011/06/21 08:32 Visibility: World by planetcruiser
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by planetcruiser

ok, "bug fixing" it is then. :) an issue that i see right here is that some external links point to the forum post. i could't find a ticket for it, so i created http://trac.bevolunteer.org/ticket/1427. i would like to work on this as a little starter to get to know the processes.

what was the issue with the dev server? is there a thread that i can read? bewelcome.org/mailman gives me a 404.

what were the tasks of the communication team? is there a wiki page about it?

i can understand the frustration about the low number of concurrent website users, but how does conceiling it fix it? ;) i think it would be *transparent* to show this. especially the total number of members is interesting for people that check back every now and then. it's actually showing a healthy growth! more interesting would be an "active users" count, so let's say logins in the last 3 or 6 months. the numbers won't be great, but i think we should face and address them.

as for a meeting, let's have one? i will be between hamburg and berlin all summer, so i would be willing to organise something. maybe at micha's place in berlin if he agrees?

talking about summer, today is the beginning of it, making this the longest day of the year - yeah! :)

subaculture

posted 2011/06/21 08:51 Visibility: World by subaculture
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by subaculture

Hi all,

Nice to see people back ... the start of the summer means a reason to use BW and reasons to suggest people use BW. Maybe we can have a "reset" period (a week in August?) where we ask all users to use BW in some way (for hosting, surfing, posting in a forum, twittering, putting up a poster, recommending it to a friend). I know its not easy to keep BW active. Maybe we could design a simple web-based poster / flyer for the "RESET BEWELCOME" and see if we can get some activity going.

M

planetcruiser

posted 2011/06/23 10:51 Visibility: World by planetcruiser
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by planetcruiser

@subaculture: why would you call this "reset" and not "reactivation" or a more catchy name?

obviously users are lacking something in bewelcome, otherwise they would become active by themselves. we need to find out what that lack is about. :) just asking for more participation without giving something in return, like long desired features or bug fixes, won't work.

i think reactivating the community also needs some offline activities like meeting. we all like to meet, so let's have a party! :)

subaculture

posted 2011/06/23 11:30 Visibility: World by subaculture
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by subaculture

RESET is shorter / snappier and reminds me of a recent attempt to restart Russian and American relations (it didn't work!!) .. but reactivation is fine too!

But your main point is correct. Unless users actively use the site and then actively blog about the experience/ twitter about it / tell their friends about it .. .. BW won't take off. I am not sure anything is lacking .. but there have been many suggestions (Servas, integrating it with hitchwiki, creating subsections like goths.bewelcome.org, moving over to Drupal).

Paradoxially, there was a dicussion on CS about reactivating BW.

http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=7621&post=7117387

One of my posts there:

- I do like BW - its organizational transparency, horizontal leadership, lack of ego's, hidden agenda's ..
- The profile appearance has changed and improved alot (no more white spaces and gaps)
- I think the forum is like ropey with too many stickies (technical chat mixed up with travel plans).

It seems it is difficult for BW to find traction. While tripping is quite a new Hospex, it seems to have a lot of traction (at least on facebook). While that's no proof of site usage, it is a means to keep that community feel together (even though much of their content discussion on facebook is quite silly / western-centric).

BW needs its volunteers to speak more about BW - their experiences, the people they met - on twitter, blogs, facebook (and maybe get reminded to do so). It would be great if BW could get a different intern to volunteer as media/marketing person for 3 months. They would spend 40 minutes each day on facebook, BW forums, twitter etc (and in return get to say they worked with a major Hospex site).

But my major recommendation is not to look simply to sustainable hospitality but to sustainable moving, communication and dwelling.

That means getting more involved with hitchhiking (hitchwiki), lightfoot posting, dumpster diving, squatting etc...and offer a whole lifestyle, rather than one component.

A online webinrar ( http://www.gotomeeting.co.uk/fec/ ) would be a start. Maybe me could do a doddle (doodle.com/) and organize a date to do a online chat?

Michael

atopia

posted 2011/06/25 16:39 Visibility: World by atopia
last edited on 2011/06/25 18:40 by atopia

Unfortunately I don't have time for a lenghty reply right now, just two things: for me BeWelcome worked amazingly well for actual hospex and I like how that is not cluttered with with all this "give more couch" crap. What I always missed (not being on Facebook ;) is more social networking / friends / groups stuff apart from special relations which in my view would keep more people connected through their friends and groups of shared interest in BW.

igorc

posted 2011/07/06 18:17 Visibility: World by igorc
last edited on 2011/09/03 09:57 by igorc

I should be quiet but i will not ;)

So I admit that only now after 2 years of being a member I've "found some time" to finally update my profile and even to create a group. But ok is better late than never.

The main reason because till now i did not find the time is that in the las t period whenever I have been here it seems always that nothing happens.

So probably we as members should be more active but at the same time it is not so easy... The whole page seems complicated. The forum for example is to deep, to vaste... we should keep it simple. The groups it will become something like in CS - thousand of groups with the same or very similar title. The searching tool is searching the words only in groups title - it should be maybe more wide - to search even in descritopns.

Yeah Ok.. now it seems that it is easy for me to write.. but this is not the point... I'm try to see it from my user point of view. and here I should add that it is not a good point of view because for a list of technical reasons I will never join CS... but there are so many members that are members there... Hm, so maybe I'm not the ideal member to give advice ;)... ... or maybe not? What kinf os users we will lik to meet here on BW?

And in this moment another thing came in my head... Few days ago I have added my trip. Initially I have suposed that the users from the cities where I will travel will se my nick on the first page in the "Who is Who" column on the bottom under the "Next visitors to your city"... But later i realized that no detalied info was asked... I have just write some sentences in one box. Where is the point? And how to bee listed in that "Next visitors to your city" box?

Anyway something should be done here... :P

Igor

PS: The link on currently active users should came back somewhere on the first page like "currently online" but visible only for loged users (only an opinion).

thorgal67

posted 2011/09/12 20:15 Visibility: World by thorgal67
last edited on 2011/09/15 17:55 by thorgal67

Quote from Igorc: PS: The link on currently active users should came back somewhere on the first page like "currently online" but visible only for loged users (only an opinion).

I agree with you on that. I think it was removed because it was depressing to see only a few members online. Now that member activity has gone up (as can be seen on the statistics page and of course also on the forum) it might be an idea to put it back visible. Especially when we want to promote using the chat function in BW.

bojel

posted 2011/09/24 08:54 Visibility: World

Hey everyone

I am in the same mood, looking around what's cooking

I am preparing a trip to Germany at the end of this week, eventhough it's much easier looking for host in some other pages I wanted to start using Bewelcome, but unfortunately I couldn't find anyone, but I am much into this now... so I will start promoting myself on BeWelcome.

I had already have my first host in Barcelona through this page, it was a good experience, but as usual, I left her my comment but nothing back so I will keep on trying just in order to start building a decent profile.

I mostly host in Madrid than I get hosted, but if any of you wants to visit, you know you have a place here!

See you around the world

Robert

isafakir

posted 2011/09/24 14:37 Visibility: World

be welcome is not very PR savy. and it's organizers haven't exactly been very friendly or open...

isafakir

posted 2011/09/24 14:41 Visibility: World

BW's organizers' agenda may be open but they aren't open ... they are a tight closed circle just like CS or HC really no different, only a lot less savy and ruthless than casey and his cohorts...

planetcruiser

posted 2011/09/25 08:51 Visibility: World

hi everyone,

a lot of things have happened since i started this thread just 3 months ago. i became quite involved with bewelcome, co-organised a little developer event, witnessed the birth of the bw-drupal project, saw the big c$ bang happening and participated in the epic developer chat meeting (27+ people!) last thursday. so bewelcome is well on its way to rock the non-profit hospex world again, and i am happy to be part of it, now as "infrastructure coordinator". :)

isafakir wrote:

> BW's organizers' agenda may be open but they aren't open ...
> they are a tight closed circle just like CS or HC really no different,
> only a lot less savy and ruthless than casey and his cohorts...

huh? sorry to hear that you got this impression. regarding openeness, we discuss everything publicly in the chat (logs) and the dev list (archive). everyone is welcome to join the progress! apart from these communication tools only a sysadmin list (archive, private for security reasons), private chats and sometimes emails to small working groups are used. but we always encourage everyone to discuss things relevant to the community publically, as is recommended by our statutes.

we might be a bit slow and on some level unorganised at the moment, because the orange turtle called BeWe has been sleeping for a while and needs to wake up still, but we certainly don't have a hidden agenda of ruling the world or something and are not intentially walling ourselves in, as your comment suggests. ;)

isa, can you be more detailed about what makes you think we are "a tight closed circle"? because if we really are or have become that, i personally would like to change that and make bewelcome more open and accessible for everyone. and i am sure most (all?) of the people active in bw that i know will be with me in this.

also, if you have a concrete proposal on how to improve something in bewelcome, please send it to us, we (and you if you join the process) will discuss and refine it and eventually vote on it and put it into practice as soon as resources are available. with the latter being the most challenging i admit.

cheers, and enjoy your sunday - meinhard.

carmencru

posted 2012/01/10 17:05 Visibility: World

hello planetcruiser

I saw your "developper event"

can you tell me if it works now and how? if not when do you thinbk it will work and will it be possible to send invitations?

I would like to be an active local volunteer but without tools to welcome new members, at least to be warned that a new member created a profil nearby us , or event tools its neraly impossible :o(

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