12.09.2008

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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15.07.2008

A remark I hear far too often is “I want to volunteer in BeWelcome, but I don’t know how/where/what!”. Of course, on the one hand it’s never easy to start getting involved in something, but surely we can do better?
What makes it so hard to get involved and to stay involved?

1. There’s a lot of barriers in place: You have to have a BW profile, enter your name here, there and everywhere.


2. It’s often unclear who is supposed to help you along, so you’re just sort of waiting for a reply from someone.


3. You have to pick a team or teams and then it’s still not clear what your actual tasks might/could be.

As always, I think it’s important to start from good principles, so that the actions afterwards taken are logical and effective. The main principles I see here are:

1. Getting involved should be clear, fast and straight-forward.


2. It’s important to have a personal connection to your responsibilities. Our best work is done by people that have a very clear view of what is expected of them.


3. Keep it simple!

I think having “coordinators” like Philipp is actually very helpful, but the idea of all those “teams” seems quite far from the underlying reality. Think about it, we have almost 1 team per two active volunteers (let’s say active means a post per week) and most active volunteers are part of multiple teams… It is also clear that almost everyone works ad-hoc and only on things they are interested in. To me, this is fine, but it also means we have to work with that in mind.
So, I would like to propose a few things.
First, I think task-based thinking should prevail over team-based thinking. Theoretically, any active volunteer can pick up any task that is desired, as long as they are clearly defined. That in turn means that the current coordinators should primarily focus on finding and writing down possible tasks, from consensus or decision in the organization or from a bug report or question. They should also focus on supporting and (re)activating volunteers that pick up tasks within their “area of expertise”. As an example, a translation coordinator could say “language … needs better translation, who can help?” and subsequently support anyone who volunteers with access rights, explanations, etc.
Secondly, I think the BeVolunteer forum (at least) should reflect this ideology. We shouldn’t be dividing posts by topic, but by intention: What is their purpose? Is it a question? A general idea? Does someone need help? Is it a task that can be done? That way, anyone can look into the right area to either get an answer, to volunteer or to make a remark, regardless of topic.
So, what could an intention based forum look like?

1. Help
   
   Are you stuck with something on BeWelcome or BeVolunteer? Find help here.


2. Questions and answers
   
   Ask questions about BeVolunteer or BeWelcome here.


3. Volunteer
   
   Looking for something to do? We have plenty of things to work on.
   
   (This could be split into “open tasks” and “closed tasks”.)


4. Big Ideas
   
   Do you have a great idea? Post it here!


5. Organization
   
   Polls, reports, etc. This would be the “official stuff”.

Ideas could be developed in “big ideas”, submitted to a poll in “Organization” if necessary, to be broken down into tasks in “Volunteer”. In “Volunteer”, there would have to be clear links to the relevant coordinator (preferably it’s who submits it there), should the volunteer need support. Depending on a someone’s available time and personality, it would make sense to help out with small things (Q & A) or to get involved in the big theoretical discussions in “Big Ideas”. And again, coordinators would need to be able to extract polls, conclude discussions and formulate tasks.
The “old” forum would need to be put into an archive, possibly with interesting threads moved to relevant new locations.
An interesting idea would also be to have multiple coordinators per topic (why not?) and perhaps even a few “multipurpose coordinators”, being people that can help coordinate with just about any topic. (People like Frank, Philipp, Claudia, Kasper, Jean-Yves and myself come to mind.)
I’m hoping the current coordinators are enthusiastic about these ideas or at least willing to try it out. Let’s hear some feedback and get the fire burning!
Update (2008-07-17): After some discussion, I think a good point can be made to combine “Help” and “Questions & answers”, if only because it is quite difficult for an average user to see the difference between them.

15.07.2008

Things always take a bit longer than you wish (except for vacation, which is almost always too short), but I think it’s a good time to announce the successful move to the new server of BeVolunteer.org.
Callum is the first to be congratulated and thanked, as it was he who moved most of the applications and databases. Almost everything was running smoothly in a days work (a few hiccups in test.bewelcome.org, our test environment and some mailing related challenges), which shows just how good our team really is at this stuff! (Let’s not forget the rest of the sysadmins who helped smooth out the process: Tobias, Philipp and Kasper.)
The Blog has received a major overhaul:

• The three blogs (main, internal, tech) were united again! I have strong hopes that centralizing our public communication will improve our transparency even more and provide an easy way to track what is going on inside BV. All of the user profiles should still be accessible, although you might have to reset your password.


• Upgraded to 2.5 and added the Akismet spam filter.


• A proper skin, with all the relevant logo’s and colors.


• All the important links (Wiki, BeWelcome and forum) are now added in the navigation. If you’re logged into the blog, you will even see OTRS and Trac as links!

There is still a lot to do however. Let’s see what’s left on my “todo list” from last week:.

• Update the access list (who has access to what).


• The forum needs a sharp, reorganizing mind. How can it be made public? (My current approach would be to move the current non-public boards to “archive” and restart the board with a much simpler structure that is open to the public.)


• Remove the old RSS feeds in BW.org and include the feed of this blog in a proper, visible location on BeWelcome.org.


• Conform the style of the blog, forum and Wiki. (Special note: I’ve put common design files such as logo’s in /html/common/.)


• Not everything has been moved from the old Joomla installation yet. Downloads (press releases, logo’s and pictures) especially should not be abandoned!


• After everything else is satisfied: disable old blogs and joomla. I think this should be possible on Thursday.

Besides these very practical tasks, I would like to put some effort into reorganizing the volunteer management structure. I think it would be a good exercise to see how a potential volunteer would explore both BV and BW and how they could get going in the most transparent way possible.
I’d like to continue this cleaning effort until the end of July so please, if you have time, join in and make this work!
Cheers!

- Thomas