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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Rethinking volunteer management and the forum

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.

Significant improvements!

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

Summer cleaning: This Saturday! (12th of July)

To really get something done, you have to plan for it. So, this Saturday I’m calling upon everyone that can spare some time to help us restructure and update www.bevolunteer.org. Drop in at any time during the day to help with one or several of the following tasks (I will be present starting 9 am CET, but Callum will come online sooner). If you need certain access to be able to do something, somebody will get that for you. Some things can also be prepared in advance, to go online on Saturday. This list is of all things that I believe have a large general support, so no controversial actions should be included here. It’s an ad-hoc activity, so you’ll have to coordinate yourselves within the group.

The majority of the work will have to be coordinated with moving bevolunteer.org to the new server (Mule), hopefully we’ll have a couple of sysadmins online. However, not all work is technical or even needs server access, so anyone can help.

The end goal of Summer Cleaning is to create a BeVolunteer site that is more easy to navigate, where it’s easier to find the right up-to-date information and where it’s a lot easier to help out.

Please, be pragmatic and look at what actually works at this moment and what doesn’t. This is not an exercise in management theories! Another good guideline is: centralize information, decentralize access.

What can you do for the BeVolunteer Spring cleaning?

Blog

• Moving the blog to the new server and merging the tech blog into the main blog.
• Make the blog the homepage and add links to the wiki, trac and the forum.
• Create a simple “about” page, similar to the Wiki homepage (if we can just include the content of the Wiki homepage, maybe that works too!)
• Grab content that is still relevant from Joomla and work it into a static blog page or the Wiki.
• Create a new skin for the Blog, so the styling is more conform to the “BV style”!
• Include a feed on the BV homepage of the most recent Wiki updates.

Wiki

• Update organizational pages (who is responsible for what?) and clean up the linking to those pages.

Volunteer management

• Map out a clear plan of how volunteers are “guided” through BeWelcome/BeVolunteer and simplify, simplify, simplify! (Suggested improvements are: link the “contact us” page on BW to the relevant sections, look at the application procedure, etc.)
• Can we simplify the team structure? Right now, there are far too many non-active groups and it’s the same people in many places anyway. Is there a possibility to have a more task- (ad-hoc) or person-based approach? Work out a practical plan!

Forum (Note: Since this is - IMHO - the most controversial one, I won’t suggest too many radical actions. I do - strongly - feel we should improve the forum significantly.)

• Make a report on the (technical) possibilities to open up the BV forum and how it would affect older threads.
• Look at possible merging of boards.

How to participate? You can leave a comment here indicating you will be able to help out and what you’d like to work on. Then, just show up online on Saturday. You’ll find people in Skype, Ajax chat and (probably) IRC as well.

The ultimate goal is to switch BeVolunteer.org to the new server on Saturday night, with as many improvements as possible. If we don’t get everything done, that’s fine, but let’s give it a try!

Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective wrap up

Sitting in the same room on the same couch is a good motivation to get work done. The Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective was exactly announced for this reason. I was very happy to see old and new friends. The SHE conference that took place at the weekend was a great opportunity to brainstorm about transparency, trust, the gift economy and anything else that can be slightly linked to Sustainable Hospitality Exchange.

Thanks to our star coder lemon-head, who is next to me on the couch right now I finally feel that I got into the BW Rox code and I’ve been able to clean up the code in big ways. At the same time I also have doubts about the current development pace. The framework we use is only used for BeWelcome, and our star coder is the only one who knows his way in it. We started an overview of possibilities to move forward more rapidly. At the start of the Collective I had already been tempted to try out Drupal, which has a thriving community of developers and tons of modules. This doesn’t mean giving up our code base, and it doesn’t mean another long transition. I am going to try to integrate our existing BW Rox code into Drupal and if it works well we can decide to use it. We’ve also looked into the use of CakePHP and other PHP frameworks, but we already have most of the feature of pure OOP/MVC frameworks.

I enjoyed Thomas’ post about improving communication within BW/BV - well, I was sitting in the same room while it was written. Yesterday, I actually experienced a communication issue myself. I posted something in the BeVolunteer forum and then found out that most people who are putting a lot of effort into BeWelcome are not even able to read it…

In order to reinforce the organizational identity of BeWelcome and strengthen ties between BV volunteers we at the ABC just came up with a radical idea for all our real-life meetings: paper hats. ^ Team coordinators get to wear paper hats, so that their status is known to other volunteers. /\ Members of the Board of Directors get A3 format paper hats. In order to increase the flow of ideas, you can write them down and attach them to your hat. Or even write them on your hat directly. So the more ideas you have, the bigger your hat. To avoid any silly icons on BW profiles we propose to make a picture of the volunteer with their hat. Caroline Zeller, our brand new coordinator of the paper hat team, will exploit all innovative technology for our first prototypes.

Opening the wiki took a lot of time. I think it will be easier for the forum. We get rid of the BV/BW volunteer distinction and go through the existing threads to see if they can all be opened up. lemon-head also had some suggestions for improving the functionality (with a better skin, extra links), and I totally think he should get admin rights for the forum.

Final words from Robin about the Collective: it was great to see so much creative bits and bytes flying around our ears. So, where’s the next one? Hamburg, Israel, Bretagne, Berlin, Antwerpen, Aachen or even Africa?

Thank you all for participating in any kind of way - Alicia, Amylin, Andreas, Anu, Caroline, Claudia, Dante, Frank, Harold, Jonas, Julien, Lena, Marc, Marlou, Pascal, Petter, Robin, Rose, Thomas, and many more in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

P.S. The default WordPress skin is very boring. I hope everyone is happy with the new skin - if not, suggestions for improvement are welcome.

P.P.S. I hope to see more wrap ups by more people on this blog - contact me if you need access.