BeWelcome News

A discussion about an unconference was started in January. I vaguely proposed my apartment in Brussels as a possible location. And suddenly it was the most popular option. So here it is. From Friday March 1st till Sunday March 3rd We're having a participant-driven meeting (aka unconference) about (and to improve) various aspects of BeWelcome. Most important, there will be discussions and related wiki edits, but expect also some work on code.

This is the second BW event in my apartment in…

If you want to know what kind of people joins BeWelcome there's a nice way to get some first sight. It's not a definitive profile of all membership, but it gives some hints. You just sort groups for the member count.

If you do it, you can tell clearly where most people is coming from (CS & HC) but you also see how they like to move (Hitchhikers, Cyclists) and what they eat (VegansVegetarians) and how much they like to cook!

You can see some political tendencies aswell (Alternative ways of…

Happy new year to you all from the dev team,

We just released a new version of the software running the site.

Bigger problems addressed were:

• The verification icon is now always displayed as soon as you verified another member (and vice versa).
• If you receive a new message this will be indicated with a small number after 'My messages'.
• A nasty bug that could link your profile to a group description was also fixed.

Smaller problems addressed were:

• If you need a new password the email will now…

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

20 December 2012, Rennes, France - On Friday, 14 December, worldwide hospitality exchange network BeWelcome released a major update to their website www.bewelcome.org, dropping Google Maps as default map provider in favor of free and open source OpenStreetMap.

BeWelcome decided to make the switch because thanks to thousands of individual contributors OpenStreetMap mapping material has greatly improved over the last years, and because…

We are happy to announce that we just "BeWelcomed" our 30,000th member. Over the last couple of weeks we have seen quite a few new members, much more forum activity and lots of feedback and questions about our little community.

Of course we'd choose quality over quantity any time, but it would be hypocritical to say that an open-source hospitality network does not care about an increase of its user base. After all, BeWelcome is in the first place about meeting people, and what better way to do…

Hello everyone,

it has long been in the making, a bit more than two months, but we hope this was worth the wait:

• Complete overhaul of all maps - we are now using free and open source OpenStreetMap as our default map, with the option to switch back to a Google Maps view
• Many, many bug fixes in map and city searches along the way
• Group membership management improvements

There are a few more smaller changes and improvements. Read more details in the complete changelog, if you are interested.

With…

As with continued growth the BeWelcome forums and groups are becoming more and more important, the forum moderators team decided to revise and update the rules which apply to them.

The revision focused on making the rules less ambiguous and address recent debates which arose from unclear wordings. Furthermore, they now contain some detailed information on forum and groups moderation which was hard to find earlier.

While these rules apply immediately and can also be applied retospectively, they…

Before two weeks we held the annual General Assembly (GA) of BeVolunteer, the legal organisation behind BeWelcome. During this two day meeting in Halle (Saale) we dealt with official tasks like electing a new Board of Directors (BoD), approving the financial statement of the previous year and agreeing on the budget for the following year.

Detailed information like the voting results can be found on the minutes of the GA and on our General Assembly 2012 wiki page. If you are interested in becoming…

As you might have noticed there was a problem with messaging over the weekend. A wrong configuration led to a failure of the process that takes care of message deliveries.

This issue has now been resolved and we are taking steps to ensure something like this cannot remain undetected for such a long time again.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this glitch may have caused you as a BeWelcome member.

The time has come once again for a new release of BW Rox to take your BeWelcome experience to a new level. The current release focuses on security on privacy but also fixes a number of other bugs. The highlights this time are certainly

• Persistent logins ("Stay logged in"/"Remember me") are now possible.
• Opt out from visitor tracking ("Recent visitors to your profile") is now possible
• All threads of a group can now be set to "group only" at group creation time

There are a number of other smaller…