Newsletter

News - September 2008

Dear %s,

Summer is almost over in the Northern Hemisphere and you've probably been travelling or just relaxing, so here's an update of what happened at BeWelcome in the meantime. Read about the General Assembly held in Essen, Germany, in early June 08, have a look at the New Tour and front page design and share your travel experiences in the brand new blog and trips features. Enjoy!

Results from the General Assembly
The GA is one of the highlights of the year and a great way to meet, work together, make decisions and socialize. This year's GA took place in early June at the Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany. Volunteers from everywhere participated through live audio-stream and chat facilities. Topics discussed included the finances, new features and volunteer work. The participants also elected the new board of directors which is now made up by Claudia, Frank, JeanYves, Pierre-Charles and Thomas. More details in the volunteer blog.

The New Tour
You probably noticed we made a new home page that looks way cool. To explain to newcomers what BeWelcome is all about there is now a guided tour. You can take the tour yourself and share your opinion on the BeWelcome forum. This tour is all about sharing experiences and hospitality exchange.

Tell us your travel stories!
New features are constantly being integrated into BeWelcome. The latest examples include travel blogs and trip-planners. These features are still under development and can be a bit 'buggy' so if you experience any problems, let us know! If you have a great anecdote about BeWelcome you can send it to us for inclusion on our front page.

Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective
Bringing developers together face-to-face is a very effective way of making connections, brainstorm about new ideas and get new things working on the website. New and old developers met in Amsterdam at the end of June 08 for two weeks (some even longer) to work together in the same place. More details in our wiki.

SHE Amsterdam and Antwerpen
Part of the Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective was the 3 day Open-Space Conference on hospitality exchange: SHE or "Sustainable Hospitality Exchange". The idea of the conference was to bring people together to discuss the different concepts of hospitality exchange, from a personal to a practical and also a theoretical perspective. General topics discussed involved: Ideal structure for the networks involved, the main practical challenges and the concept of SHE itself. One of the ideas that sprung out of this weekend was to create a "Bill of Rights" for social network users. This idea was subsequently also discussed in the BeWelcome forum. The Amsterdam SHE-event will be sequeled by a new meeting in Antwerpen on October 18-19th.

Stay updated, get involved!
www.bevolunteer.org is the main portal if you want to get involved or if you simply want to know more about what's happening at the moment in Bevolunteer, the organisation that runs BeWelcome.

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